The Watchtower Society's View of Science

Alan Feuerbacher

Index:

Part 1: Astronomy

Overview:

This booklet sets out examples from Watchtower publications that illustrate the following claims:

1) The Watchtower Society takes a dim view of science when it points to conclusions different from the Society's interpretation of the Bible.

2) When science supports the truth of the Bible, the Society uses the information to show that the Bible is an inspired book.

3) When science does not support the Society's interpretation of Bible, the Society obscures or omits information that should be brought into consideration.

4) The Society's writings show a lack of understanding of certain scientific matters.

Like the Stars of the Heavens in Number

The Society often makes use of Genesis 22:17 to prove the Bible's inspiration. In this scripture God says to Abraham:

I shall surely multiply your seed like the stars of the heavens and like the grains of sand that are on the seashore.

A short article on page 25 of the April 8, 1988 Awake!, says concerning this scripture:

The Bible is scientifically correct in comparing the number of stars in the heavens to the billions of grains of sand on the seashore. However, that stars number into the billions was apparently unknown in ancient times.... How, then, does one explain the Bible's remarkable accuracy in making this comparison? One explanation would be that the Bible is "inspired of God."

This conclusion, that the Bible is saying that the number of stars in the heavens is on the order of the number of grains of sand on the seashore, is unwarranted. First, the writer states no numbers to show the Bible is making a scientifically correct comparison. How, then, can he claim it is accurate? What is it accurate with respect to?

A far more likely meaning of the comparison is simply that the number is large by everyday standards (which for the average person means any number larger than 100), and in particular, is uncountable by virtue of the difficulty of the counting. An earlier scripture than Genesis 22:17 shows that uncountability is the main idea. Genesis 15:5 says:

He now brought him outside and said: "Look up, please, to the heavens and count the stars, if you are possibly able to count them." And he went on to say to him: "So your seed will become."

Also, Jeremiah 33:22 says:

The army of the heavens cannot be counted, neither can the sand of the sea be measured.

The actual number of each is easy enough to estimate. Astronomers conservatively estimate there are about one hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and probably about one hundred billion galaxies comparable to our own in the observable universe, for a total of

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

stars. Note that this could easily be far too low, as the estimate only takes into account what astronomers can actually see or reasonably estimate is out there, and there is nothing to indicate how large the universe actually is.

To estimate the number of grains of sand in the sea, let's make a few assumptions. First assume that the sand is at the sea coasts, and the sea coasts cover one percent of the earth's surface. Then assume that the sand covers that surface to a depth of ten meters, and every sand grain has a volume of one cubic millimeter. We simply use the formula for the volume of a sphere, V = 4/3 . PI . R3.

The mean radius of the earth is 3,982 miles, or 6,408,421 meters. Let this radius in meters be R. The volume of a spherical shell 10 meters thick at the radius of the earth is V = 4/3 PI [R3 - (R - 10)3], which works out to be about 1015 (1,000,000,000,000,000) cubic meters. There are 109 cubic millimeters in one cubic meter. Multiply that by the volume we just found and take one percent; we get about 1022, the same as we got for the number of stars:

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

So, making reasonable assumptions, we find the number of stars may indeed be comparable to the number of grains of sand in the sea! This seems to be a remarkable accomplishment.

Note, however, the following quote from Revelation 20:7, 8:

Now as soon as the thousand years have been ended, Satan will be let loose out of his prison, and he will go out to mislead those nations in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together for the war. The number of these is as the sand of the sea.

By any reasonable estimate, the number of people misled would not be over about ten billion. Comparing this to the numbers derived above, we find that they differ by a factor of one trillion.

Therefore, if you insist that the Bible is being literal when it uses the sand of the sea to represent any number of people on the earth, you must admit that the Bible is in error by a factor of at least a trillion.

If you don't want to admit that, then you must admit that the Bible is using poetic license when it compares a quantity to the sand of the sea or to the stars of the heavens.

Under these circumstances, it is hard to justify using Genesis 22:17 as an indication that the Bible is "inspired of God." Genesis 13:16 again confirms this use of poetic license in God's words to Abraham: "if a man could be able to count the dust particles of the earth, then your seed could be numbered."

Poetic license does not constitute scientific proof, even if it sometimes produces an interesting correlation between our rough estimates and selected verses in the Bible.

Star Differs from Star

The September 22, 1984 Awake! article "Telescopes and Microscopes -- Have Their Revelations Undermined or Strengthened Your Faith?" claims that the Bible is shown to be inspired by the statement of 1 Corinthians 15:41, where the apostle Paul says:

The glory of the sun is one sort, and the glory of the moon is another, and the glory of the stars is another; in fact, star differs from star in glory.

Under the subheading "Star Differs From Star" the article quotes this scripture, and then asserts that it shows the apostle Paul must have been divinely inspired in order to make the statement "star differs from star in glory," since "to the casual observer most stars look alike, except perhaps for their difference in brightness."

In actual fact, many stars do not look alike to the naked eye, as anyone can see outside brightly lit city areas. In the constellation Orion the star Betelgeuse looks quite red, while the star Rigel looks bluish-white. The September 1992 issue of Sky and Telescope magazine said on page 266:

The stars that fill the sky on a dark night differ not just in color, as even a casual observer may notice. Although the multitude of dim stars appear merely white or gray to the naked eye, the brighter ones -- as well as the planets -- offer subtle and varied colors that can make for fascinating study. The most conspicuously colored stars were recognized at least 4,000 years ago and have been described consistently throughout the world ever since.

Color is even more apparent in the "stars"1 the ancients called "wanderers," which we now know to be planets. Saturn looks yellowish; Mars is reddish. The ancient Greeks, in fact, associated Mars with the god of war precisely because of its red color.

The Awake! article acknowledges that even a casual observer can see that star differs from star in "brightness." But the ancients were not casual observers. On the contrary, they were intense observers of the stars, and could see that the stars were different from one another in "glory."

The article asserts that use of the word "glory" implies not only color and brightness, but any other physical property the star possesses -- in particular those not observable with the naked eye, such as density, size, and the fact that pulsars flash. This is stretching a point. The scripture mentions only "glory," not a list of physical properties. The claim that "glory" means anything other than the physical appearance observable with the naked eye has no basis whatsoever.

My last statement relates to the interpretation of the original Greek word "doxa," which is translated "glory,"2 and the meaning of the English word "glory." Strong's Concordance3 gives the basic meaning of "doxa" as "glory"; other translations of the word can be dignity, praise, honor, and worship. The English word "glory" has connotations of praise, honor, distinction, renown, resplendence, magnificence, beauty, brightness, splendour, eminence, grandeur, illustriousness, notability, etc. Applied to sun, moon, and stars, the meanings "resplendence," "splendour," and "brightness" are most to the point, as none of the other connotations make sense. The Jerusalem Bible, for example, uses "brightness." The New English Bible uses "splendour" and "brightness." The Aid book also acknowledges these other meanings4 in a reference to 1 Corinthians 15:41, where it says God "has richly ornamented his creation with color, variety and majestic magnificence."

The point the apostle Paul is making is that there are many types of creation, which he refers to as bodies, both physical and spiritual, and they all differ in their properties. The idea he seems to be trying to get across is that a resurrected, spiritual body is different from a physical body. To illustrate that, he says, there are differences in the flesh of mankind and various animals, differences between earthly and heavenly bodies, and in particular, differences between the various heavenly bodies, i.e., sun, moon and stars. Since he uses the difference between these bodies as an illustration, he is in effect saying "A resurrected spiritual body is different from a physical body, just as you can see for yourself that the sun differs from the moon in resplendence, both of which differ in turn from the stars; in fact star differs from star in resplendence."

The Aid book confirms this interpretation on page 393, under the subtitle "The 'New Creation'":

A plant that rises from a seed in the ground is a new body differing from the seed itself in appearance. Similarly, those resurrected to heavenly life have a resurrected body that differs from the fleshly body planted in death. Each one of them, already called a "new creation" in union with Christ, is resurrected as a new creature with a spirit body in the heavenly realm.

The above cited connotations of "glory" show that the word has a vague meaning. The Awake! article capitalizes on that vagueness in attempting to attribute more meaning to the Bible's use of the word than can be justified. The context in which the word is used suggests that the intended meaning is simply "resplendent physical appearance." Since anyone can see for himself that the sun, moon, and stars differ in their "resplendent physical appearance," and since 1 Corinthians 15:41 does not specifically mention other physical properties of stars, the scripture cannot be used as proof of divinely given knowledge. Hence the article incorrectly uses the scripture to prove its point.

The Statutes of the Heavens

The September 22, 1984 Awake! article "Telescopes and Microscopes -- Have Their Revelations Undermined or Strengthened Your Faith?" claims that the Bible is shown to be inspired by the statement of Job 38:31, 33, where God asks:

Can you tie fast the bonds of the Kimah constellation, or can you loosen the very cords of the Kesil constellation? Have you come to know the statutes of the heavens, or could you put its authority in the earth?

The article asserts this scripture supplies knowledge that could only have come through divine inspiration, because at the time the scripture was written, it was not known that "statutes" governed the movements of heavenly bodies. The way in which this subheading is written either shows a great deal of ignorance of astronomy on the part of the writer, or is a deliberate attempt to confuse the reader through ambiguity, or both.

First, a constellation is not a collection of stars that move together as one body in space. It is, rather, an arbitrary configuration of stars that are grouped together from the point of view of an observer on the earth. Present day constellations are, for the most part, the same as the ancient Greek designations, and are named after a mythical figure, animal, or inanimate object. The stars in a constellation may happen to be physically close to one another in space, as in the Pleiades star cluster, but most often are not associated at all, except that they happen to lie in about the same direction as observed from the earth, and are contained in what astronomers call the Milky Way galaxy. An observer in another part of the galaxy would observe a different pattern of stars having no particular relation to the pattern observable from the earth, and would not see most of the patterns we call constellations.

On a dark night one may observe the so-called "Great Nebula in Andromeda" as a blob of light in the constellation Andromeda. While this nebula is part of the constellation Andromeda, it is actually another galaxy outside the one in which our earth is located; it is not physically associated with any star in the constellation. To an observer on the earth the constellations appear to move in orbits around the earth because of its rotation, just as the sun and moon do.

Second, the Kimah and Kesil constellations mentioned in Job may be respectively the constellations Pleiades and Orion. However, it is not known with certainty to which groups of stars they refer. It is possible to argue, as Awake! has, that the reference in Job 38 to "the bonds of the Kimah constellation" proves the writer of Job was imparted divine knowledge; otherwise he could not know the constellation was bound together. If the Kimah constellation is what we today call the Pleiades, a star cluster, one would be right. But if one used the same argument about "the cords of the Kesil constellation," and if the Kesil constellation is what we today call Orion, then one would be wrong, since many of the stars in Orion are farther from each other than they are from the earth; they are in no way bound together. Alternatively, one could argue that these references -- that constellations are collections of stars moving together in the heavens -- prove the book of Job is not divinely inspired, because: (1) If "heavens" refers to outer space, then the reference to a constellation moving through space is wrong because a constellation is hardly ever composed of a single cohesive group of stars, but is almost always a group of unrelated stars moving in unrelated directions. (2) If "heavens" refers to the sky as observed from earth, then the reference to a constellation moving through the sky is just what all ancient peoples observed, namely, the sun, moon, and stars appear to move around the earth. Hence, the reference shows nothing as respects divine inspiration.

Third, the reference to "statutes" in Job 38:33 does not show divine inspiration. One can argue that since the Hebrews and certain others worshipped Jehovah as the creator of heaven and earth, it's only natural that their writings would refer to Jehovah as having statutes governing heaven and earth. After all, He had statutes governing everything else.

Finally, the Awake! article has no basis for stating that "gravitational forces are the 'bonds' holding stellar constellations -- such as Kimah -- together," since in general, "stellar constellations" are not collections of stars held together by gravity. Neither has the article any basis for stating that the Bible's reference to stars' orbits applies to stars' orbits around the center of the galaxy -- Job refers only to bringing "forth the Mazzaroth constellation in its appointed time" or to "conducting" the "Ash constellation" in the heavens -- these are evidently references to paths in the sky above, not outer space.

The Circle of the Earth

The scripture Isaiah 40:22 is often cited as evidence that the Bible is correct when it touches on scientific matters. The scripture says:

There is One who is dwelling above the circle of the earth, the dwellers in which are as grasshoppers, the One who is stretching out the heavens just as a fine gauze, who spreads them out like a tent in which to dwell.

Awake! of September 22, 1981, page 25, says concerning this scripture:

In the eighth century B.C.E., Isaiah wrote of Jehovah "dwelling above the circle of the earth." The Hebrew "hhug," translated "circle" can also mean "sphere," as Davidson's "Concordance" and Wilson's "Old Testament Word Studies" show. Hence, Moffatt's translation of Isaiah 40:22 reads: "He sits over the round earth."

The November 1, 1977 Watchtower said on page 646:

A scientist, or an individual interested in science, may be quite surprised to learn, that some 2,200 years before men in general accepted the fact that the earth is round, the Hebrew prophet Isaiah wrote [the words of Isaiah 40:22].

The most extensive discussion I've been able to find on the Bible's use of "circle of the earth" is in the December 22, 1977 Awake! which said on page 17, after quoting Isaiah 40:22:

The Hebrew word here rendered "circle" also may be translated "sphere." (A Concordance of the Hebrew and Chaldee Scriptures, by B. Davidson) Interestingly, regarding "circle" in this verse, the Scofield Reference Bible says in a marginal note: "A remarkable reference to the sphericity of the earth."5 Moffatt's translation reads: "He sits over the round earth," and the Catholic Douay Version says here: "It is he that sitteth upon the globe of the earth." Of course, the inspired Word of earth's Creator would properly indicate that the earth was round, though the ancients in general thought it was flat.

The ancients in general may have thought the earth was flat, but that doesn't mean much. Even with all the knowledge available today, the majority of Americans believe that astrology is a valid science. The point is what the real scholars believe -- that will tell the state of scientific knowledge.

The above Awake! article acknowledges the fact that the earth was known to be spherical by some ancient scholars:

When did men first suspect that the earth was round, not flat? In the days of Christopher Columbus? No. Earlier than that! Irving Robbin wrote: "To believe that one could sail to the East by sailing west, one must also believe that the earth is a sphere. A Genoese sea captain name Christopher Columbus believed this, but he was not alone. He was not alone by many centuries, for as far back as 500 B.C., a Greek scholar, Pythagoras, asserted that the earth was round. A Norwegian textbook written in 1250 not only said the same thing, but also gave the reasons for the varying climates of the earth, the angle of the sun at different times of the year and the prevailing winds. Not all ancient knowledge had been lost -- it was just out of favor for a while."

Pythagoras lived about 540 to 500 B.C.E. Much earlier, however, the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, of the eighth century B.C.E., indicated that the earth was spherical.

So scholarly Greeks as far back as the sixth century B.C. believed that the earth was a sphere. Other Greeks besides Pythagoras had something to say about the shape of the earth. Aristotle, in the fourth century B.C., offered three proofs that the earth is a globe: (1) ships leaving port disappear over the horizon; (2) as one travels to the south, stars that are not visible in Greece appear above the southern horizon; and (3) during an eclipse, the earth's shadow on the moon is visibly curved.6

In the fourth century B.C., the Greek Aristarchus, in his On the Size and Distances of the Sun and Moon, used geometric arguments to try to establish those values. While the values were wrong due to limitations in making the necessary measurements (Proposition 15 derived the ratio of the diameters of the Sun and Earth as between 19:3 and 43:6; he derived a distance to the Sun of 18-20 times the distance to the Moon), the basic ideas were sound.

In the third century B.C., the Greek Eratosthenes actually measured the diameter of the earth. Hearing that the sun shone directly down a well at Syene (now Aswan) at noon on the summer solstice (the longest day of the year), he measured the angle between the sun's rays and a plumb bob he lowered down a well in Alexandria, some six hundred miles north of Aswan, precisely at noon. Using simple trigonometry, he calculated the diameter of the earth to be about 8,900 miles, remarkably close to the true value of 7,964 miles.

The Greek astronomer Hipparchus had worked out by about 150 B.C. the distance to the Moon by trigonometric methods, and found it was sixty times the earth's radius.7 The earth's radius is about 3,964 miles, and sixty times that is 237,840 miles. The true figure is about 238,900 miles, a remarkable agreement.

Ptolemy, in the second century A.D., invented a conical map projection to compensate for the roundness of the earth: "When the Earth is delineated on a sphere, it has a shape like its own....". Propositions 19-21 in Book V of the Almagest contain a geometrical argument yielding a distance from the earth to the sun of 1,210 terrestrial radii (4,800,000 miles). While this is small by a factor of 20, it gives a solar parallax of less than 3 minutes, below the limit of observational accuracy at the time.

In the fifth century B.C. Anaxagoras, according to Plutarch and other ancient writers, taught the correct explanation of Moon's phases.

The Greeks knew many things that apparently other ancient peoples didn't, but recent research shows, remarkably enough, that they got much of their knowledge from even more ancient peoples. An interesting example of this was the discovery reported in the New York Times of January 8, 1950 that the ancient Sumerians were familiar with what later became known as the Pythagorean Theorem:

Baghdad, Iraq. The discovery here two months ago that school boys of the little Sumerian county seat of Shadippur about 2000 B.C. had a "textbook" with the solution of Euclid's classic triangle problem seventeen centuries before Euclid has resulted in a summons from the Iraqi Directorate of Antiquities to United States archaeologists.

There is evidence that clay "textbooks" of the schoolboys of Shadippur contain an encyclopedic outline of the scientific knowledge of their time, which will necessitate a sharp revision of the history of the development of science, and, accordingly, of the story of the development of the human mind....

Even now, the famous clay tablet on which the basic geometrical problem was presented about 4000 years ago is so clear that it takes a layman back to the days when he puzzled over his own geometry test. Not a line of the drawing is faded in the baked clay nor is a word of the text, which only cuneiform specialists can understand. The chief cuneiform expert.... says that the presentation of the famous solution of the problem is tinged with algebraic concepts that appeared even later than Euclid in the development of Western mathematical science.

Besides this tablet, there is another, presenting a catalogue of mathematical problems. According to experts now studying the material, it suggests that mathematics reached a state of development about 2000 B.C. that archeologists and historians had never imagined possible....

Recent discoveries of cuneiform writing seem to indicate the Sumerians knew the earth was spherical. Any people associated with the Sumerians or the civilizations derived from them would likewise have some of their knowledge. This obviously applies to the Israelites, as well as the Greeks. When the book of Isaiah was written is controversial among Bible scholars, and is unprovable. Therefore one cannot use the purported date Isaiah was written to prove anything. One can only use it as part of a body of evidence.

The real question here is, Did Isaiah really say the earth is spherical? This hinges mainly on what the original Hebrew word translated as "circle" in the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures meant. The above citations from Awake! indicate that the original word "hhug" could mean either "circular" (a plane round figure) or "spherical" (a 3-dimensional round figure). If the original word could mean either a flat circle or a sphere, then both the original general usage, and the specific context of the scripture, must be used to determine the real meaning. Of course, if the real meaning cannot be determined conclusively, then the scripture cannot be used to prove that the writer of Isaiah had divine knowledge. By going to several Hebrew concordances we can find out the primary meaning.

Strong's Concordance8 gives several meanings for the Hebrew word chuwg (apparently the transliteration from Hebrew to English varies), translated as "circle" at Isaiah 40:22. Here are the applicable entries, minus the Hebrew letters:

2329. chuwg; from 2328; a circle: -- circle, circuit, compass.

2328. chuwg; a prim. root [comp. 2287]; to describe a circle: -- compass.

2287. chagag; a prim. root [comp. 2283, 2328]; prop. to move in a circle, i.e., (spec.) to march in a sacred procession, to observe a festival; by impl. to be giddy: -- celebrate, dance, (keep, hold) a (solemn) feast (holiday), reel to and fro.

A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament9 gives similar renderings:

chuwg; noun; vault, horizon; of the heavens, sea and earth.

chuwg; verb; draw round, make a circle.

A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language10 gives:

chuwg; noun; circle, circuit, horizon.

chuwg; verb; to make a circle, to move in a circle.

Note that in the above references the English words for chuwg all refer to plane figures. Paraphrasing Webster's dictionary, a circle is a flat ring. A circuit is a line, often circular, encompassing a boundary; the space within such a boundary; or a route traveled around a boundary. A compass is a boundary or circumference, a circumscribed space, or a curved or roundabout course. Again, the English words all refer specifically to plane figures. They are not synonyms for "round," which can refer to either 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional objects. The words from the related chagag also refer to things that are intelligible only in the sense of a plane figure, such as moving in a circle. As the publications quoted earlier say, the original Hebrew word may also mean "sphere," according to two other concordances, so the English renditions are apparently not exact. But the fact that the majority of concordances refer to "circle," and have no references to "sphere," shows that "circle" is the primary meaning, and "sphere" is secondary. The best that can be said is that "sphere" cannot be ruled out.

In any case, "circle" is probably the best translation. Otherwise, why would most translators not use a different word, a prime example being the New World Bible Translation Committee? This committee said in the foreword to the New World Translation, that they "feel toward [God] a special responsibility to transmit his thoughts and declarations as accurately as possible." If the New World Translation has been translated correctly, then "sphere" is an incorrect rendering.

What about other references to the shape of the earth in the Bible? Nowhere does the Bible explicitly state the shape of the earth, so let's see what a few scriptures say, to get the general flavor.

In the New World Translation Daniel 4:10-11 relates Nebuchadnezzar's dream:

"'Now the visions of my head upon my bed I happened to be beholding, and, look! a tree in the midst of the earth, the height of which was immense. The tree grew up and became strong, and its very height finally reached the heavens, and it was visible to the extremity of the whole earth.'"

The word "midst" means "middle" or "center." Therefore, other Bible versions say "a tree in the middle (or center) of the earth." This verse says the tree was visible to the extremity of the whole earth, and therefore paints a picture of a flat, circular earth. The tree stood in its center and had its top in the heavens so as to be visible from all over the earth. This would be impossible on a spherical earth.

Daniel 4:10-11 describes a vision given to Nebuchadnezzar by God, and the Society says it is a major prophecy of the Bible. Why would God give a prophecy of such importance by giving Daniel an incorrect picture of the shape of the earth? If Daniel had a mental picture of the earth as a sphere, and the vision pictured the earth as a sphere, what part of the earth could be called the center? How could a tree of any height be visible to its extremities? If Daniel had a mental picture of the earth as a sphere, and the vision pictured the earth as a flat circle with the tree in its center, would not Daniel and his readers have been confused? The logical conclusion is that Daniel's mental picture and the vision were consistent, and therefore the scripture suggests the picture the Bible writers had of the shape of the earth. It suggests a flat, circular area large enough to hold all the kingdoms known to the Bible writers, with the heavens a hemispherical vault nestled down over the earth, not unlike the picture of Greek mythology. If you say this scripture is just using picturesque language, then the same can be said of Isaiah 40:22. The Interpreter's Bible argues similarly:11

.... the ancient Oriental conception of the world tree.... was commonly conceived of as being on the navel of the earth, and so in the midst of the earth. In those days the earth was thought of as a disk, with the heavens as an upturned bowl above it; thus the tree is pictured as growing in the center of the land mass of this disk and extending upwards until its top touched the vault of heaven, in which case, of course, it would be visible from any point along the edge of the land mass.

This picture in Daniel is further strengthened by the account of the Devil's tempting Jesus. Matthew 4:8 says:

Again the Devil took him along to an unusually high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.

Again the picture is that all the kingdoms of the world could be viewed from a sufficiently high mountain, which is not possible on a spherical earth. If this was not the intended picture, then why was it used? The Devil could have showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world from anywhere at all.

With this picture of a flat, circular earth in mind, note how Isaiah 40:22 makes complete sense:

There is One who is dwelling above the circle of the earth, the dwellers in which are as grasshoppers, the One who is stretching out the heavens just as a fine gauze, who spreads them out like a tent in which to dwell.

This scripture and the picture of a flat, circular earth with a roof over it also make sense as rendered in other Bible translations. This is typical:

God sits throned on the vaulted roof of the earth. (The New English Bible)

There is nothing in Isaiah 40:22 to conflict with the picture of a flat, circular earth. Other scriptures give a similar picture. Job 22:14 says of God:

.... on the vault of heaven he walks about. (New World Translation)

.... he walketh in the circuit of heaven. (King James)

.... he prowls on the rim of the heavens. (The Jerusalem Bible)

Job 37:18 says the heavens are hard like a metal mirror:

With him can you beat out the skies Hard like a molten mirror? (New World Translation)

Can you beat out the vault of the skies, as he does, hard as a mirror of cast metal? (The New English Bible)

Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a heavy metal mirror? (King James)

Will you.... Be with him to consolidate heavens strong as a metal mirror? (The Bible in Living English)

Can you help him to spread the vault of heaven, Or temper that mirror of cast metal? (The Jerusalem Bible)

As to viewing the vault of heaven as a thin metal sheet, Isaiah 34:4 mentions:

And the heavens must be rolled up, just like a book scroll. (New World Translation)

.... and the skies will curl back like a roll of paper. (The Bible in Living English)

The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 5, says concerning Isaiah 40:22:12

The earth is conceived as a dome. In Prov. 8:27 the circle (hugh) is the "vault over the face of the abyss" (tehom); in Job 22:14 Yahweh walks upon the vault of the heavens.

Of course, the sky is immaterial. What we perceive as a solid dome over our heads is simply the scattering of blue light from white sunlight. Many other scriptures refer to the earth in connection with a circle, and various translations render the verses in such a way that a picture of a circle, not a sphere, emerges. Many of these scriptures might be viewed as using allegory or poetic license to make a point, not as a literal statement of the shape of the earth or the composition of the heavenly roof. But this is precisely the point about Isaiah 40:22. The book of Job obviously uses both figurative and literal language; any conclusions showing which it is using in any particular case are open to a great deal of argument and will be biased by the prejudices of whoever is making the arguments.

In light of all the scriptures that talk of a circular earth, heavens like a beaten metal mirror that can be rolled up, and the lack of definitive context for Isaiah 40:22 that shows it refers to a sphere, one cannot claim the scripture says the earth is spherical. Therefore Isaiah 40:22 cannot be used to prove that Bible writers were divinely inspired.

The question as to what Isaiah 40:22 actually means illustrates the point that there can be more than one interpretation of what a Bible writer is really saying. Describing wisdom, Proverbs 8:27 in the New World Translation says:

when he prepared the heavens I was there; when he decreed a circle upon the face of the watery deep.

The Interpreter's Bible13 comments:

Vss. 27-31 describe wisdom at the creation of the world. She saw God spread out the firmament like a vault over the earth. She saw the mighty waters of the deep hemmed in at God's command by the great land masses. She was by God's side as he created the universe and the various forms of life that were to inhabit it. Compass or circle: The term probably refers to the "vault" or solid expanse of the sky which, like a dome, rested on the deep....

The Society often refers to Job 26:7, where God is described as "hanging the earth upon nothing." Taking this scripture along with Isaiah 40:22, it can be argued that the Bible writers viewed the earth as a sphere hanging in empty space. But this argument, based on just these two scriptures, ignores the evidence I've considered above.

First, note that in Job 26:7, Job himself is speaking. Later God himself speaks, and in Job 38:6 we get a somewhat different picture, when he says about the earth:

Into what have its socket pedestals been sunk down, Or who laid its cornerstone?

This doesn't sound much like the Bible writer had in mind an earth hanging in the emptiness of space, or he would have phrased the question differently. If you argue that the Bible writer is speaking figuratively or poetically, as does the Watchtower,14 then you have negated your ability to show that the scriptures are talking about the literal configuration of the earth. And that is precisely the point about Isaiah 40:22.

There are other completely different interpretations of Job 26:7. The Interpreter's Bible15 gives one:

he stretcheth out the north over the void.... and hangeth the earth upon nothing (cf. the parallelism between void and nothingness in Isa. 40:17, 23). This amounts to a poetic description of creatio ex nihilo. The northern regions of the earth are connected in a special way with the sojourn of the gods.... Possibly the north designates here the Stella Polaris on which the constellations appear to circumambulate. Although the poet's cosmogony is geocentric, he fully understands that the earth rests upon nothing and receives its stability only from the will of the almighty Creator.

The author of Job is not the only ancient writer to speak of the earth hanging upon nothing. The Greek philosopher Anaximander thought that the earth was hung upon nothing. He conceived of the earth as a cylinder, suspended on nothing at the center of the sky, which was a hollow sphere surrounding the earth.16 So the Bible's reference to the earth hanging on nothing is not unique.

The Society argues in the Insight book, under the subject "expanse," that the Bible's use of this word (Hebrew, "raqia") to refer to the heavens is consistent with the Hebrew picture of the earth as a sphere:

Some endeavor to show that the ancient Hebrew concept of the universe included the idea of a solid vault arched over the earth, with sluice holes through which rain could enter and with the stars fixed within this solid vault, diagrams of such concept appearing in Bible dictionaries and some Bible translations. Commenting on this attitude, The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia states: "But this assumption is in reality based more upon the ideas prevalent in Europe during the Dark Ages than upon any actual statements in the O[ld] T[estament]."

As usual, it's not quite that simple. The previous paragraph in the Insight book just got finished saying that the

Greek Septuagint used the word stereoma (meaning "a firm and solid structure") to translate the Hebrew raqia, and the Latin Vulgate used the Latin term firmamentum, which also conveys the idea of something solid and firm. The King James Version, the Revised Standard Version, and many others follow suit in translating raqia by the word "firmament."

The Septuagint was translated by Jewish scholars around 280 B.C. It seems reasonable that they, being Hebrews, knew what the Hebrew concept of the universe was, knew how to translate their own language into Greek, and would not have translated "raqia" improperly.

The Insight book gives what it thinks is the proper rendering:

However, in its marginal reading the King James Version gives the alternate reading "expansion," and the American Standard Version gives "expanse" in its footnote. Other translations support such rendering.

After having looked up for myself the meaning of "expanse" and "raqia" I don't see how Insight can argue as it does. According to Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, "expanse" means

something spread out typically over a wide area: as (a) FIRMAMENT (b) an extensive stretch of land or sea.

The New Strong's Exhaustive Concordance gives the translation of "firmament," "raqia" and related words in several entries on page 363:

firmament 7549

7549. raqia'; from 7554; prop. an expanse, i.e. the firmament or (apparently) visible arch of the sky: -- firmament.

7554. raqa'; a prim. root; to pound the earth (as a sign of passion); by analogy to expand (by hammering); by impl. to overlay (with thin sheets of metal): -- beat, make broad, spread abroad (forth, over, out, into plates), stamp, stretch.

7555. riqqua'; from 7554; beaten out, i.e. a (metallic) plate : -- broad.

A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language by Ernest Klein renders raqia:

flattened : 1. metal beaten out thin 2. flattening.

The Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew and English Lexicon gives its definitions on page 956:

noun. extended surface, (solid) expanse (as if beaten out; cf. Jb 37:18);.... 1. (flat) expanse (as if of ice,... as base, support.... Hence (Ez 1:22) 2. the vault of heaven, or 'firmament,' regarded by Hebrews as solid, and supporting 'waters' above it, Gen 1:6,7,8...

Ezekiel 1:22 reads, in the New World Translation:

And over the heads of the living creatures there was the likeness of an expanse like the sparkle of awesome ice, stretched out over their heads up above.

The Jewish Publication Society's Tanakh renders the verse:

Above the heads of the creatures was a form: an expanse, with an awe-inspiring gleam as of crystal, was spread out above their heads.

Under the subject "Awe," Insight, Vol. 1, page 222, describes this verse:

Visionary representations of Jehovah's glory had an awe-inspiring impact. The platform of the celestial chariot, above which the prophet Ezekiel saw the glory of Jehovah, sparkled like awesome ice. High above the heads of the living creatures, which were representations of cherubs, this platform was like a translucent expanse, awesome in size and appearance. Through the translucent platform, the representation of what appeared to be a throne of sapphire stone was visible.

See also the picture on page 44 of The Nations Shall Know That I Am Jehovah -- How? The "platform" is clearly illustrated.

These descriptions show that not only the original Hebrew word, but the Society's translation of it into English and descriptions in various of its publications, give the concept of something spread out over an area, typically horizontally, something with a broad, 2-dimensional quality. There is no hint either in the Hebrew or the English of something spread out in three dimensions, as an "open space." Also the words have only a secondary reference to whether or not the thing spread out is solid -- the basic concept is a shape, not a material quality. The Insight book seems to get confused about this, in focusing on the concept of solidity, rather than the concept of being spread out:

While it is true that the root word (raqa) from which raqia is drawn is regularly used in the sense of "beating out" something solid, whether by hand, by foot, or by any instrument.... in some cases it is not sound reasoning to rule out a figurative use of the word.... Thus at Job 37:18 Elihu asks concerning God: "With him can you beat out [tarqia] the skies hard like a molten mirror?".... it is clear that the Bible writer is only figuratively comparing the skies to a metal mirror whose burnished face gives off a bright reflection.

Note that the scripture not only compares the skies to a metal mirror, but alludes to God's creation of the sky by beating it out like a metal mirror.

So, too, with the "expanse" produced on the second creative "day," no solid substance is described as being beaten out but, rather the creation of an open space, or division, between the waters covering the earth and other waters above the earth. It thus describes the formation of the atmospheric expanse surrounding the earth and indicates that at one time there was no clear division or open space but that the entire globe was previously enveloped in water vapor.

Other uses of raqia in the Bible are obviously literal. 2 Samuel 22:43 says:

And I shall pound them fine like the dust of the earth; Like the mire of the streets I shall pulverize them; I shall beat them flat.

Exodus 39:3 says:

Then they beat plates of gold to thin sheets.

Ezekiel 6:11 says:

Clap your hands and stamp with your foot.

To argue that "in some cases it is not sound reasoning to rule out a figurative use of the word" is not at all the same as showing conclusively that a particular instance of use is figurative. Yet this is what the Insight book does. It merely asserts: "So, too, with the 'expanse'...."

There appears to be confusion in the Society's references as to what, and the manner in which, something has been spread out to form the expanse. Is it vertically, with a 3-dimensional quality as the Society implies, or horizontally, as the references I've quoted imply? Either concept may be argued to be consistent with Genesis 1:6, 7:

'Let an expanse come to be in between the waters and let a dividing occur between the waters and the waters.' Then God proceeded to make the expanse and to make a division between the waters that should be beneath the expanse and the waters that should be above the expanse.

Based on the previous references, the picture Genesis gives is of God making a horizontal surface (the expanse, like a beaten out metal plate) in the waters, then lifting up the surface along with the waters above it. In lifting it up, he creates a division between the waters above and the waters left below the surface he has just lifted up. The expanse and the act of making it are one set of things, and the act of making the division is something else. The division is the space between the horizontal surface (the expanse) and the surface of the waters below.

This concept, that the expanse is a broad area, not a 3-dimensional space, is further indicated by Genesis 1:20, which says, ".... let flying creatures fly over the earth upon the face of the expanse of the heavens." The scripture presents a picture of a broad horizontal expanse of sky above one's head with birds flying across its face. That is exactly what you see when you look up and see a formation of geese. It makes no sense to think of the face of a vertical division between earth and sky. Where would the face be?

It does not help to claim that the expanse is the atmosphere -- there is little justification for it other than the Society's picture of what it would like Genesis to say. The Bible itself rules out the interpretation of the expanse as the atmosphere. Gen. 1:14, 17 says "God went on to say: 'Let luminaries come to be in the expanse of the heavens....'.... Thus God put them in the expanse of the heavens to shine upon the earth." Did god put the luminaries in the atmosphere? Clearly not. He made them visible in the face of the expanse, i.e., in the spread out appearance of the sky. No other image fits.

As a side point, in talking about the expanse, the Creation book misquotes Genesis 1:20, when it says17

birds could later be said to fly in "the expanse of the heavens," as stated at Genesis 1:20.

Genesis says nothing about birds flying in the expanse; it speaks of birds flying upon the face of the expanse. There is a critical difference, which Creation notes and duly ignores.

The Bible writers may or may not have viewed the earth as a sphere hanging in the emptiness of space. If they did, it is not significant, because so did Greek scholars, who had contact with the same ancient peoples as did the Hebrews. I don't claim to prove anything from the above scriptures other than that it is clear they are inconclusive in proving or disproving divine inspiration of the Bible.

Part 2: Biology

Overview:

The Design of Life

The argument is often made that "the design of life requires a Designer." The Society's articles on this subject in the October 8, 1982 Awake! do a nice job of explaining the idea. One point of the article is that Genesis 1:29, 30 shows vegetation was the only food of man and animals at the time of man's creation. The scripture says:

And God went on to say: "Here I have given to you all vegetation bearing seed which is on the surface of the whole earth and every tree on which there is the fruit of a tree bearing seed. To you let it serve as food. And to every wild beast of the earth and to every flying creature of the heavens and to everything moving upon the earth in which there is life as a soul I have given all green vegetation for food." And it came to be so.

When the design argument is considered, we are compelled to conclude that some animals have always eaten meat. (Does a tiger seem designed to graze on grass?) This in turn means either the Awake! article's interpretation of Genesis is wrong or the scripture itself is wrong.

Awake! answered this point in a reply to a letter from a reader in the January 8, 1983 issue, which reply said with reference to Genesis 1:29, 30:

This does not mean that vegetation was merely the ultimate basis for food supply through a chain of animal life. Obviously it was not the case with humans because later when they were to begin to get some nourishment from animal flesh they had to be given a special concession. Further, during the Flood of Noah's day, eight humans and 'flying creatures and all moving animals of the ground' were obliged to live on vegetable matter exclusively for more than a year. And the fact that Isaiah 11:6-9 and 65:25 specifically state that former predators will be at peace with other animals, and the lion will eat straw like the bull, would seem to confirm that animals and humans were meant to be vegetation eaters.

Let us now assume that "the design-equals-a-Designer argument stands unrefuted"18 and examine some of its consequences.

Existing Features

One of Awake!'s readers pointed out some of the consequences19 in his reference to the poison of snakes and spiders, and to other "ingenious instruments of various kinds of predators." The Society's reply said that "existing features were put to a different use from what was originally purposed. We do not believe it is possible to establish for a certainty how things were in the distant past by observing the present.... As for the many predators being suited for the chase and kill, what about humans? They have shown an extremely efficient talent for attacking and killing their fellowman. Does that argue for humans' being designed that way from the beginning? Admittedly, we cannot answer all questions that arise in this matter from what we observe today, and the account in the Bible is quite brief. Yet, we believe that humankind and animal kind were originally designed to live at peace with one another and to get their nourishment from vegetation. That original purpose will be restored during the Messianic Kingdom. We will have to wait and see how those prophecies are fulfilled."

But this reply skirts the reader's question. It says "existing features were put to a different use...." but neither the reply nor the October 8th articles mention how that could possibly be done with "poison" or any "other ingenious instruments." Twice the reply mentions "we believe...." That belief is, of course, based on the Bible, but as no proof is offered, or even evidence, it must remain merely a belief. Finally the reply says "we will have to wait and see...." But the October 8th articles were written mainly to convince non-believers of the Bible's truth, whereas the reply relies on the Bible itself and the Society's belief in it as the ultimate authorities. This is like saying "the Bible is true because it says it is true and we believe it" -- hardly an argument to convince a non-believer. The articles could not have been written to convince believers, as they are already convinced.

Let's pursue further the idea that "existing features were put to a different use." The articles point out several examples of things designed for good that could be used for bad: a kitchen knife that can be used for cutting vegetables or killing people, a jet aircraft that transports people or bombs, the human hand that can hold a baby or strangle one. But the articles avoid mentioning anything that was specifically designed for killing, such as a sword, or a jet fighter complete with machine guns, guided missiles and bombs. There are things that have been designed for killing and only for killing; they have not been adapted from some other use. By not mentioning them, the articles give the impression no such things originally existed in the animal kingdom, and they also imply this by stating animals were not designed to hurt, maim, or kill each other. Finally the articles give up trying to explain these points by saying that in some vague, unspecified manner,20 as man turned toward lawlessness, the earthly creation, too, became chaotic. Man lost his loving dominion over the animals. Since humans could not control themselves peacefully, it is no surprise that the animals are in the same condition.... The animals.... began to live off one another.

How did all these things happen? What connection is there between man's turning to lawlessness and a lion's turning to eating gazelle? Or to a snake's eating rodents instead of fruit? Or to a spider's eating insects? What could possibly cause a sperm whale, which has no obvious connection with the goings on of the land, to begin eating giant squid instead of giant kelp? What specifically caused the animals to begin to live off one another? What specifically is the connection between men not being able to control themselves peacefully and the same condition in animals? How could animals have "adapted themselves to eating flesh?" Let the Society answer these questions, and not try to hide behind broad generalities.

There are countless cases where animals were designed to kill, or just as important, to defend themselves from being killed. Consider poisonous snakes. Their poisons are either highly effective nerve toxins or muscle relaxants. They have complete physical systems to deliver the poison, including specialized poison glands, fangs, body muscles and nervous systems. Vipers have heat sensitive organs to detect their warm-blooded prey. Snakes have the temperament -- stealth and patience -- to use their weapons effectively to capture prey. Of what use are nerve toxins or stealth or heat detection in capturing a banana? Threaten a poisonous snake, and with what will he threaten you back? His fangs. He instinctively knows how to use them. Snakes have been genetically programmed and designed to capture prey. They have not turned their eating equipment from vegetation to animals -- the equipment was superbly configured to eat animals to begin with. There is no conceivable use to which nerve toxins, muscle relaxants, fangs, the instinctive ability of constrictor snakes to suffocate prey, or any of the above mechanisms, could be put in consuming vegetation.

How about spiders? There are probably no more efficient predators in existence. Many are poisonous and many build webs. All eat other animals; none eat vegetation. An article in Technology Review, in discussing the application of natural toxins to medical treatment, mentioned how spider poison works:

In the early 1980s, a team of researchers in Japan discovered the mechanism by which a joro spider paralyzes its prey. Experimenting with the nerve cells of squid, the scientists showed that spider venom acted very precisely to block the effects of glutamate, an amino acid that is an important neurotransmitter.

The discovery drew special interest since the same neurotransmitter is critical to the functioning of the human brain. Cells throughout the human nervous system use glutamate as one of several chemicals that allow electrical signals to pass from one cell to another. Recognized by receptors in the cells, glutamate can act like a key in a lock, causing the cell wall to open a channel to the flow of ions.21

How did these toxins come to be except by God's creating them? Why do spiders, and snakes, possess such efficient nerve toxins? Do they need them to paralyze seeds or fruit? Do they build webs to catch seeds blowing in the wind? Throw a seed into a spider's web and you'll see. He'll ignore it. But throw in an ant, and see how quickly he dispatches it. Web building spiders respond only to disturbances of their web that appear to be from a struggling creature. And spiders don't eat just insects -- some tropical varieties are big enough to regularly prey on small birds and bats. From what uses could spiders have turned webs and poison to catching other animals? Could spiders have genetically reprogrammed themselves to eat other animals? Why are all spiders predators? The exquisite design of spiders as predators could no more have come about by their changing themselves than it could have come about by evolution.

The nudibranch, or sea-slug, is an amazing example of the design of predators. Certain kinds of nudibranchs eat sea anemones, which are covered with stinging cells. Normally whenever an animal touches the stinging cell's trigger mechanism, the cell shoots out a barb and injects poison that paralyzes the animal. But when the nudibranch eats the anemone, for some reason the stinging cells are not triggered. Furthermore, the cells are not even digested along with the rest of the anemone, but are transported through the digestive system to the skin, where they are emplaced and perform a protective function for the nudibranch. There is no way this mechanism could have come about by evolution. No more so could it have come about by adapting some sort of apparatus originally used for eating vegetation.

Then there is the desert scorpion of the American Southwest. It senses the location of its favorite prey, the desert roach, buried under the sand, by two sets of vibration sensors in its feet. What sort of vegetation scrabbles about under the sand, so that a scorpion would need such sensors? And like the spider and snake, is its behavior not instinctive?

A Scientific American article on a predatory fish, the frogfish, made some interesting observations.22

Commerson's frogfish.... which is widespread in the Indian and Pacific oceans, is representative of the group in many ways.... In shallow water, where streaks of sunlight mottle the ocean floor, the fish bears a remarkable -- almost uncanny -- resemblance to an algae-encrusted rock. And there it sits, the classic example of a lie-in-wait predator, ready to strike at any fish or crustacean that passes by. Should a suitable animal swim too close, the large, cavernous mouth of the frogfish opens, engulfing its hapless victim in a matter of milliseconds.

Mastering the art of mimicry has thus imbued frogfishes with an important evolutionary advantage. By appearing to be inanimate, frogfishes are not only overlooked by those that prey on them, but they are also overlooked by their own prey. In addition, they are surprisingly effective at enticing prey within striking distance -- in large part because they possess a small appendage called a lure that projects forward from just above the animal's lip and can be wiggled when prey come into view.

In some species the [lure] mimics a small fish; in others it seems to mimic a crustacean or a worm.... The effectiveness of the lure is based on more than just appearance, however. A frogfish must wiggle and manipulate the lure in ways that simulate the natural swimming movements of the animal being mimicked. The fishlike lure of the warty frogfish, for example, ripples as it is pulled through the water and so mimics the lateral undulations of a swimming fish. [See the photograph on page 100 of this article.]

To our knowledge, a frogfish can extend its mouth and engulf its victim at a speed greater than that of any other vertebrate predator. In fact, such rapid prey capture is perhaps the most remarkable of all the frogfish's attributes.... With the aid of such modern techniques as high-speed cinematography, we have spent a considerable amount of time analyzing the biomechanics of feeding.... By integrating frame-by-frame analyses of high-speed film.... with anatomical analyses of the bones, muscles and ligaments in the fish's head, we have come to realize that prey capture in the frogfish involves a highly choreographed sequence of behaviors.

The frogfish is an efficient predator. It blends in with its background; it uses a lure that resembles other animals; it has feeding structures that let it suck in prey faster than any other fish; and it has other exclusively predatory features. There is no way all these complex and interrelated mechanisms can be due to some sort of subverting of apparatus originally designed for eating vegetation any more than they could have evolved.

There are many other examples of animals that are designed for predation: frogs and toads have tongues designed to catch insects; the oceanic food chain is generally such that larger animals eat smaller ones, and only the smallest eat plants; whales have balleen designed as strainers to filter out plankton, which includes animals up to medium sized fish, and often includes larger fish. When you see an eagle gracefully swoop down and scoop a fish out of the water, who do you conclude taught it to do so? When you read that an owl's wings have special feathers on the trailing edge to enable it to silently swoop down on its prey in the dark, who do you conclude created this ability?

What about parasites? One marvelously designed parasite is the virus. It comes in a bewildering variety of forms, all parasitic, that show strong evidence of design. Viruses take over the genetic machinery of cells and reprogram it for their own use. How could such things have come about on their own? How can their design be reconciled with a loving creator?

There do exist animals which, it can be plausibly argued, were originally vegetarians rather than meat eaters. The bear and gorilla are cases in point. But there is strong evidence against this argument in the fundamental genetic programming -- instinct -- that causes most predators to seek prey. The ratio of the number of different animals that are predators and have big teeth, claws, etc., to the number that are not predators but have big teeth, claws, etc., is large. This large ratio is evidence against a switch in eating habits. How many animals do you know of that have the equipment of a predator, but don't act like one? How many animals do you know of that don't have typical predator equipment, but eat other animals anyway? Bears, gorillas, monkeys and man are the exception, not the rule. Most people assume that, because of their teeth, gorillas are fierce predators. They are surprised to learn that gorillas are vegetarians, and are rather peaceful creatures. Why are they surprised? Because most animals fit the usual pattern and gorillas do not. Some bears are nearly exclusively vegetarians, while others such as the polar bear are exclusively predators. Many bears seem to learn their feeding behavior from their parents, so arguing that at least some animals learn their predatory behavior is correct. But the polar bear is superbly designed to live on the Arctic ice cap, where there are no plants at all. The polar bear has special physical structures allowing it to survive in extreme cold. Is it reasonable to believe that the creator designed the polar bear to live in a place where there was no food? Who taught the first polar bears how to find seals under the ice?

Then too, look at the design of the digestive systems of certain predators, such as the cat family. Animals such as cats have a difficult time even chewing vegetation, even though they do occasionally eat it. Their intestines are short, compared to those of grazing animals, indicating they were designed to extract nutrition from meat rather than bulk vegetation. Cat digestive systems don't even extract all the food value from meat, because their intestines are so short. Some predators, such as hyenas, will eat the feces of lions because there is a lot of food value left in it, while they will not eat the feces of other predators such as jackals or other hyenas because these animals extract most of the nutritive value from what they eat. Again, is it reasonable to argue that the creator changed the design of many creatures after the Flood?

Most predators, like spiders, scorpions, snakes, and fish, instinctively prey on other animals. They do not learn their behavior from their parents. Some animals do learn part of their predatory behavior from their parents, but these are in the minority. The instinct is present from birth, as can be attested by anyone who has raised a dog as a house pet, and seen it instinctively shake a rag in a violent manner, just as it would if it were killing another animal. The instinct had to have been put there by a designer.

I don't think anyone would want to argue that God changed animal instincts after mankind's fall, since God would still be the designer of the new instincts. Even less would anyone argue that God changed the physical structure of predators so as to enable them to capture and eat prey. Spiders preserved in amber millions of years ago show they have the same basic structure today. The remains of lions, wolves, and many other predators preserved for tens of thousands of years in the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles show that those ancient animals were virtually the same as ones living today.

Fossil Evidence

There is also fossil evidence that animals ate one another in the long-distant past. A photograph of a "middle Eocene perch (Mioplosus) swallowing the herring Knightia, from Wyoming's Green River Formation"23 shows that ancient fish ate one another, just as they do today. Two more similar photographs appear on pages 190-191 of National Geographic magazine, August, 1985. One shows the fossil of an adult fish in the act of swallowing a juvenile of the same species. The other photograph shows the 25-million-year-old remains of two saber-toothed cats locked in combat. One had bitten deep into the leg bone of the other, a thrust that trapped both in a common fate. The cause of the death of the two cats is as clear as the causes of the extinction of their species are obscure.

The fossil of an adult fish in the act of swallowing a juvenile of the same species (National Geographic, August, 1985, pp. 190-191)

The 25-million-year-old remains of two saber-toothed cats locked in combat (National Geographic, August, 1985, pp. 190-191)

There is evidence that predators have existed since the earliest animals came into existence. Much fossil evidence recording the explosion of life at the beginning of the Cambrian era has been found. There are many fossils of types of animals that do not exist in later periods of the fossil record. Concerning this life, a Scientific American article said24

The Cambrian diversification, while rapidly establishing new phyla and classes, also initiated the first complex communities of animals linked by food chains. The existence of new types of communities in turn created niches for new types of animals. A key element in the establishment of animal communities is predation, which establishes a hierarchic chain of food-transfer connections among animals. Previous assumptions that predators were not important in Cambrian communities have been overturned by new indications that the impact of predation was great. There are essentially three kinds of evidence: actual fossils of predators, specimens of damaged (and sometimes partially healed) prey and antipredatory adaptations in some animals.... [One] predator is Anomalocaris, which.... is gigantic by Cambrian standards and resembles no living animal.... and Whittington suggest that Anomalocaris is largely responsible for one of the other major signs of predation in the Cambrian: wounded trilobites.

There are numerous fossilized trilobite specimens that have had bites taken out of the carapace. In most cases the wounds are partially healed, indicating that the carapace was still attached to the trilobite when it was damaged, rather than having been damaged by a scavenger after being shed by the trilobite. There are other examples of predatory damage, such as small shelly fossils with boreholes in them. The holes resemble those made by certain modern predators that drill through shells to eat the soft meat inside.

The caption for two photographs in this article made a similar point:

Wounded animals provide striking evidence of predation during the transition period. The image at the top shows a damaged and healed shell of Hyolithellus.... The photograph at the bottom shows a wounded and healed carapace (exoskeleton) of the trilobite Olenellus robsonensis.... That the wounds have healed is important, because it demonstrates that the damage was done during the life of the animal and was not inflicted later on a corpse or an empty shell.

Virtually any book on fossils shows photographs of or refers to similar events. Direct evidence for predation comes from a description in National Geographic of fossil evidence.25 In 1964, John H. Ostrom of Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History discovered an unusual fossil in Montana badlands,

.... a small, totally new kind of dinosaur more than a hundred million years old. And the creature's fossilized remains offered astounding clues to its life and habits. One such clue prompted the scientific name I later gave this peculiar beast: Deinonychus, which means "terrible claw.".... Deinonychus's sharp, serrated teeth revealed that it had been a carnivore, and its skeletal structure indicated it belonged to the suborder of dinosaurs known as the Theropoda (meaning "beast foot"). Included among the theropods is perhaps the best known of all dinosaurs -- the giant, fearsome Tyrannosaurus ("tyrant lizard"), which also stalked its prey across Montana, but some fifty million years after Deinonychus.... Compared to Tyrannosaurus, Deinonychus was a lightweight: 150 to 175 pounds, eight or nine feet from snout to tail tip, and standing only four to five feet high. Like all other theropods, Deinonychus stood, walked, and ran on its hind legs like a large bird.... [The find] was evidence of a dinosaur very unlike the stereotyped picture of the slow-moving coldblooded reptiles. If anything, it was more like an oversize roadrunner.

But the striking feature of Deinonychus -- and the reason for its name -- was on its feet. All previously known theropods had birdlike feet, but Deinonychus also had a huge, sicklelike bone more than three inches long on one toe of each foot. In life, sharp, curved, nail-like sheaths covered these claw bones and must have been four or five inches long. Obviously they served as weapons -- most probably to kill prey.... The arms and hands of Deinonychus were another surprise. The long hands bore sharp claws designed for grasping. The wrist joints enabled the hands to turn toward each other, permitting precise grasping of prey by both hands working together -- something only man and certain other mammals can do. Deinonychus almost certainly was a swift-footed predator that ran down its prey, seized it in its powerful hands, and then slashed at the belly and flanks of its victim with those razor-sharp talons.

.... I was especially gratified to find my hypothesized killing techniques -- those slashing kicks of the foot talons at the belly of its victims -- team of paleontologists led by Dr. Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska of the Institute of Paleobiology in Warsaw, Poland, made an incredible discovery in Mongolia's Gobi Desert in 1971. Her expedition, jointly sponsored by the Polish and Mongolian Academies of Sciences, uncovered the skeletons of two dinosaurs tangled together. One was the fairly well-known Protoceratops, a calf-size plant eater with a turtlelike beak. The other was a rare, two-legged, near-man-size carnivore -- Velociraptor ("swift robber").

These two animals had apparently killed each other, and their skeletons had been buried and preserved exactly as they died. Velociraptor, like Deinonychus, had a large sicklelike talon on each hind foot, and it died with one of those foot claws embedded in the belly of Protoceratops -- an amazing life-and-death drama from 80 million years ago!

Another article said with regard to the conclusion the above mentioned theropod dinosaurs were predaceous:26

That conclusion has been dramatically verified by the discovery in 1971 (Kielan-Jaworowska and Barsbold, 1972) of a specimen of Velociraptor mongoliensis that died in the act of killing a small Protoceratops andrewsi. The specimens are preserved with the hands of Velociraptor clutching the skull of Protoceratops.

In India were found "complete skeletons of two ancient crocodilelike reptiles, and curled within their stomach cavities, the remains of their lunch -- two smaller fossil reptiles."27 A skeleton of the small dinosaur Coelophysis was found containing a devoured baby of its own species, and in 1987 the 15 foot skeleton of a theropod dinosaur was found interlocked with a larger herbivore. Apparently they died in combat, possibly sinking into the sandy bottom of a shallow lake.28

This evidence dramatically shows animals did not live in peace with one another prior to mankind's fall. Awake!'s contention that animals ate only vegetation and lived in peace with one another before mankind's fall is at odds with the evidence.

Adaption and Evolution

Take into account what I've said so far, and then reconsider Awake!'s vagueness in telling how the animals might have adapted themselves to eating meat, what prompted them to do so, or any other details of their supposed adaptation. They just sort of magically "adapted," and they did it "themselves." This sounds just like the explanations evolutionists use when trying to explain how complicated structures like eyes or wings evolved. The structures always sort of "appear," and there is little attempt to show just how they appeared.

Refer back to Awake!'s reply to the reader I mentioned earlier, where it says "As for the many predators being suited for the chase and kill, what about humans?" True, man's efficiency in killing man and animals does not argue for his being designed that way from the beginning, but this has nothing to do with any animal. Man is designed in a general way. Most animals are designed to be efficient in only one area. And the above information shows that predators were specifically designed to be good at catching and killing other animals. To disprove this, the Awake article would have to consider information like the above, detail by detail, and show how each mechanism had been subverted from some other function. The statement in the October 8, 1982 Awake! that animals have "adapted themselves to eating flesh" is presented without any evidence. It is remarkably similar to an early attempt to explain evolution (proposed by Lamarck), which said that, for example, giraffes adapted themselves to eating high vegetation by growing long necks ("acquired characteristics").

I do not believe it is possible for the Society to show specifically how any structures were adapted to eating flesh. Predatory animal's mechanisms for catching and killing prey are too well designed for that purpose. By analogy, an intelligent man can deduce that a jet fighter is designed to kill people, not transport them. If Genesis 1:29, 30 truly means all animals were designed to be vegetarians, then that scripture must be false. Predators can not credibly be said to have been designed as vegetarians.

The October 8, 1982 Awake! articles raised the significant moral issue wrapped up in the "design-equals-a-Designer" argument. Keep in mind the above discussion when reading the following summation from these articles:

As to the argument that design proves a Designer, it was then reasoned: 'If you say that those talons, hooks and teeth, the reign of terror, hunger and sickness were designed by God, then you must accept that this God of yours is responsible for suffering and violence. Yet you say he is love. Which is it?....'

Design is design, no matter what purpose it currently serves. The more complex the design and the more that all its many parts must work simultaneously, the more compelling the proof of an intelligent designer. Nothing in the whole of human experience contradicts this conclusion.

Now, remember what was said about the frogfish:

we have come to realize that prey capture in the frogfish involves a highly choreographed sequence of behaviors.

The Awake! agrees the frogfish's equipment was designed:

There is no reason to shy away from applying this principle to the animals that at present prey upon one another. Their teeth and claws were obviously designed....

The problem Bertrand Russell raised about the Klan, or the Fascists, has nothing to do with the argument as to whether a Designer exists; rather, the problem has to do with the use of what was designed. With humans, free will comes into play, and this free will is itself a marvelous product of design. But why have humans so often used free will to do bad? And the animals, were they designed to kill and maim? Too, why has the Designer permitted all of this?

Humans may have free will but animals do not. Their behavior is governed almost entirely by instinct.

Really, the problem is not a question of whether a Designer exists; rather, it is a moral question. Man's implanted sense of right and wrong is strong enough so that at times he is not satisfied by any explanation that does not address the questions of violence and killing and God's permission of wickedness....

Despite the abundant evidence showing that the design in nature requires an intelligent Designer, many persons do not believe that God exists. They feel that a loving Creator would not have designed the violence, killing and wickedness so prevalent on earth.

However, what if God did NOT design the violence and killing? What if he is NOT responsible for the gross wickedness among humans? Instead, what if he detests these things....

Did the human and animal creations always behave the way they do now? Have they always hurt and maimed and killed? Were they designed to do that?

The answer to these questions is: NO, not at all!....

Well, then, just how was it long ago? Why are things the way they are now?....

When God created humans and animals to live on this earth, he did not purpose for them to be killers. They were created to have peaceful relations with one another. Thus conditions were altogether different from what they are today....

Animals at Peace

The assertion that animals lived in peace with one another is flatly contradicted by the fossil evidence.

What was the food of the animals? The inspired record states: "To every wild beast of the earth and to every flying creature of the heavens and to everything moving upon the earth in which there is life as a soul I have given all green vegetation as food."

Since the scripture makes no specific exceptions, it must include insects and fish.

Mankind's problems began when our first parents misused their free moral agency. They were seduced by a rebellious spirit creature to believe that they could determine right and wrong without God's help. They chose independence from God. But that was not the Designer's fault....

What does all this have to do with why predators exist?

Since humans wanted independence, God gave it to them. However, no longer would he sustain them in perfection. So imperfection and death came into being....

Now note how incisively Awake! gets to the heart of the matter.

Thus, independence from God and his laws is what turned man into the way of imperfection, violence and death. Also, as man turned toward lawlessness, the earthly creation, too, became chaotic. Man lost his loving dominion over the animals. Since humans could not control themselves peacefully, it is no surprise that the animals are in the same condition.

Why is it no surprise? What is the connection? Also note, Adam did not expect or choose independence from God when he sinned. He expected to die since that was what God told him would happen.

Yet, what about the features of animals and humans that are used for maiming and killing? Since God created a vast variety of different features, many of them could be adapted to the new situation to help in survival.

Which ones? Some examples might be helpful.

For instance, most animals would continue to eat vegetation, as is the case down to this day.

For instance of what? Of adapting to a new situation? Why would some animals continue to eat vegetation and some change their eating habits?

An example is the powerful gorilla, with its awesome fangs -- fangs still used to rip and consume heavy vegetation. But others adapted themselves to eating flesh....

Why? How? Do animals have free will or control over their genetic makeup or heredity? How did bears and lions develop the instinctive habit of killing young of their own kind?

The Awake! articles on design do not answer the moral question they raise, namely, how a loving Designer could design instruments of cruelty and death. Instead they speak in sweeping generalities and assiduously avoid specifics.

The September 15, 1990 Watchtower said on page 15:

We may well laud Jehovah when we see a falcon soaring in the heavens or a gazelle bounding over a verdant hill.

How then, may we view Jehovah when we see a cheetah bounding after the gazelle and ripping open the abdomen of the still living and gasping animal? The evidence seems to leave but one conclusion based on the design-equals-a-Designer theme: life may have a Designer, but not the one described in the Bible.

Part 3: The Society's View of Science

Overview:

Definitions and Impressions

The word "science" means different things to different people. The basic meaning is simply "knowledge," but it usually implies organized knowledge, as contrasted with art. Science often means knowledge that must be acquired through study, rather than everyday knowledge people acquire through experience. Science can mean the organizations, public and private, which are dedicated to discovering new knowledge about the physical world.

Likewise, "scientist" has several meanings, but most often means someone trained in the sciences (an admittedly vague definition), especially one who has the Ph.D. degree. An engineer, although trained in science, is not usually considered a scientist.

Most scientists enter their profession out of a curiosity of how the world works. They enjoy discovering new things that no one has seen before. Their initial idealism often becomes tempered or derailed by the realities of life, however, so that many older scientists become cynical. It is similar with doctors, who often start in the medical profession with grand ideas of helping people, but get caught up in making money.

People untrained in science often view scientists as cold, calculating automatons selflessly dedicated to discovering new truths for Science (whatever that means). This attitude is enhanced by the media, who are concerned more with how a news story will fly rather than its content. Hollywood has contributed to the notion of the aloof scientist. Many scientists themselves contribute to this attitude for typical human reasons -- they like the publicity, they need money to work, etc. Some like the adulation that comes with the star status of Nobel prize winners, or the money that comes from writing best-selling popular books. Some find that by using the specialized jargon of their profession, they get more monetary support than otherwise.

But the reality is that most scientists are exactly the same as everyone else. They have their good points and their faults. Like everyone else the majority are honest, hardworking people. They are usually concerned with making a living as much as with discovering new truths. Sometimes scientists are dishonest, like most everyone else.

When science mixes with politics, unpleasant things can happen, just as when religion, business or other large human institutions mix with politics. Politics has a darkening influence on anything it touches, perhaps because it involves power to tell other people what to do and how to think. Since World War II, the growth of the U.S. government has led to the politicizing of many branches of science, especially those with military applications. Medical research has been particularly politicized, partly because the research projects are so large that only government is large enough to fund them.

It has become evident to me that the Society has little understanding of real science. Here is a useful explanation of science, from The Myths of Human Evolution:29

.... science is storytelling, albeit of a special kind. Science is the invention of explanations about what things are, how they work, and how they came to be. There are rules, to be sure: for a statement to be scientific, we must be able to go to nature and assess how well it actually fits our observations of the universe. Science is theory, mental constructs about the natural world.

Some theories are better than others. Some have been tested more severely than others. When theories remain unexamined for a long time, they tend to take on mythic qualities. We are inclined to accept them as true, sometimes in the face of rather plain evidence to the contrary.

The Fundamentals

For understandable reasons, the Watchtower Society has developed an intense dislike for much of science, whether it be pure knowledge or the institutional variety. Like so many others who are untrained in science, Watchtower writers often misunderstand what scientific pursuits or institutions are all about. As a result, they propagate their fears, misunderstandings and prejudices to the readers of Watchtower publications. Unfortunately, because of their intense dislike of science, they often grossly distort things related to science.

One of the problems is that the Society's writers do not seem to have an understanding of fundamental science. Their understanding appears to go no farther than what is available in popular books or light introductory material. To illustrate, note the way the Creation book treats the structure of atoms:30

An atom is a marvel of order, like a miniature solar system. It includes a nucleus containing particles called protons and neutrons, surrounded by tiny orbiting electrons.

Anyone familiar with physics knows that the picture of the atom as a miniature solar system was abandoned by about 1920, when ideas of quantum mechanics were being developed. This picture is still taught today in introductory science classes, but it is entirely misleading. The truth is, no scientist has the slightest idea what the atom looks like internally. The best that can be done is to describe statistically what large assemblages of atoms do. No one has any idea what electrons are doing inside atoms. An often used device is to refer to an "electron cloud." The old picture of electrons in orbits is simply not accurate.

An Anti-Science Posture

The twelfth chapter of the Creation book, "Who Did It First?", goes to some lengths to describe the various wonderful mechanisms animals have, and says that men have copied them. On page 159 it states:

All this copying from animals by humans is reminiscent of what the Bible suggests: "Ask the very beasts, and they will teach you."

This statement reveals a major misunderstanding the author has about the development of the various inventions he describes. These were almost all invented completely independent from any observations of animals. Many inventions have been refined by observing the design of animals, but the author of Creation misses the key point that people would never have understood what was involved in animals' design unless they already had the experience acquired from struggling with their own designs. The clocks and compasses described on page 155 were not copied from the equivalent structures found in diatoms and bacteria.

The author does this mainly to denigrate the achievements of man. One example is found in the description of animal thermometers on page 155:

From the 17th century onward men have developed thermometers, but they are crude compared to some found in nature. A mosquito's antennae can sense a change of 1/300 degree Fahrenheit. A rattlesnake has pits on the sides of its head with which it can sense a change of 1/600 degree Fahrenheit. A boa constrictor responds in 35 milliseconds to a heat change of a fraction of a degree. The beaks of the mallee bird and the brush turkey can tell temperature to within one degree Fahrenheit.

The author is desperately grasping at straws with this description. How, one may ask, does the author know that a rattlesnake can sense a temperature change of 1/600 degree? Surely not because men have invented accurate thermometers.

The Society often exaggerates problems in the scientific community to make its own position more secure. Note the tone in this excerpt from the Awake! article "Shenanigans in the Halls of Science":31

It isn't supposed to happen. Not in the hallowed halls of science. Not where dispassionate, objective pursuers of truth labor tirelessly in their laboratories. Not where dedicated researchers, committed to finding truth regardless of where the search may lead, seek to unravel the secrets of nature. It is not supposed to happen in a united body of men and women fighting shoulder to shoulder to turn back the ravages of disease for the blessing of mankind.

Who would suspect that dedicated scientists such as these would manipulate their data to back their contentions? Or select what supports their theory and discard what doesn't? Or record experiments they have never performed and falsify data to buttress conclusions they could not prove? Or report studies they had never made and claim authorship of articles they had never worked on or even seen? Who would ever suspect such shenanigans in the halls of science?

It isn't suppose to happen, but it does. Last year a science magazine reported: "Kickbacks, fraud and misconduct are rife among American medical researchers, according to a scathing critique published by a US Congressional committee this week. The report says that the National Institutes of Health has 'endangered public health' by failing to police the scientists it supports." -- New Scientist, September 15, 1990.

The article then reports on the fraud committed by certain medical researchers, one Dr. Thereza Imanishi-Kari and others. A Nobel laureate, Dr. David Baltimore, had coauthored a paper with these researchers, and when one of the researchers brought the fraud to his attention, he tried to cover it up. One thing led to another, and Representative John D. Dingell of the U.S. Congress forced an investigation that ultimately led to a public airing of the fraud, and a rather unsatisfactory resolution. Dr. Baltimore had become a powerful political force within the NIH, and he protected his turf.

It is reprehensible that these medical researchers committed fraud. But Awake! is not arguing coherently about the implications of these admitted problems. The problems occurred within an arm of the U.S. government, the National Institutes of Health. I hardly need expound on how much politics is involved in any large government branch. In these three paragraphs Awake! extrapolates the severe problems that occurred within one arm of the government to all of science, not distinguishing between a politically controlled organization and science as a whole. It implies that because there are problems in the NIH, all other science organizations are equally suspect. It is true that other science organizations have problems, but Awake! uses the worst example it could find to bring them all down.

The reason Awake! does this is suggested from the titles of the two articles that preceded this one: "The Bible Fought Disease Before Science Did," and "Pioneering Bloodless Surgery With Jehovah's Witnesses." It's also a good shot just on general principles, so the readership doesn't get too chummy with science. The Society has a long history of bashing science and using problems in one area to cast doubt on the whole. This is illustrated by the last paragraph of the Awake! article, on page 15:

Most people agree that such shenanigans should not happen in the halls of science, yet it was a science magazine itself that carried the report that such shenanigans "are rife among American medical researchers."

Note that it was a science magazine that reported the problem. Awake! seems to think there is something shady about this.

The Truth About Fraud

To illustrate what can be accomplished by a less prejudiced stance, note what an article in Technology Review said about the recent cases of fraud among certain science related institutions:32

.... Researchers in the ivory tower -- once regarded as saintly, thrifty to a fault with the public dollar, and, most awesome of all, steeped in nature's secrets and skilled in tapping them for humanity's benefit -- have lately come down to earth.

University scientists work with companies seeking to commercially apply (that is, derive financial gain from) their academic research. Hardly the exploitable absent-minded-professor type, they often help found the companies themselves. Whole universities, once deemed oblivious, even disdainful, of the profit motive, now wheel and deal with the best of them. Meanwhile, academic researchers demand more money than ever from public coffers, predicting widespread disaffection in the R&D community and eventual economic calamity for the nation should they not receive it.

Add to the newly mercenary perception of academia a straight-out series of black eyes -- misuse of federal funds (university yachts and presidents' home furnishings charged to the taxpayer), allegations of price fixing in awarding scholarships, and cases of misjudgment, fraud, and plagiarism -- and it's safe to say the public has been rudely awakened. Researchers turn out to be just plain folks. Like everyone else, they look out for themselves, they sometimes make mistakes, and they bruise when they fall.

.... No longer regarded as demigods, some academics worry that funds will dry up if disappointed and overreacting patrons begin to question the value of the present research enterprise altogether.... as the world changes, so too must the relationships between researchers and those who support their work. And the greatest attitudinal change must be in how the research community regards the public, not vice versa.

.... along with the public's growing sophistication in matters scientific and technological.... has come the realization that researchers' work not only is understandable to, but is the business of, everyone else. This doesn't diminish the value of the academic enterprise; it simply means that R&D is a human endeavor like any other and that its practitioners should not expect to be exempt from the usual rules.

Thus the deflation of the superhuman academic scientist is actually a good thing and long overdue. Why, after all, should the desire to make money, or the capacity to make mistakes, be so shocking? Researchers should seek to apply their work to the benefit of their institution, their country, and themselves. Such strivings are a basic human trait. So, too, of course, are frailties and excesses, though ways of minimizing their adverse effects can also be evolved -- as long as the environment is one of tolerance and mutual respect. Having discovered our partners' shortcomings doesn't mean we should quit working with them; on the contrary, it lets us collaborate more effectively.

In that spirit, even the recent lapses and scandals can be regarded as potentially beneficial to the long-term health of the research enterprise. They underscore the need for public accountability, public communication, and even public oversight, which should not be viewed as intrusions but as opportunities for interacting more fruitfully with the rest of the world. Instead of regarding the recent affronts to the academic image as a signal to defensively circle the wagons, researchers should see them as little more than a wake-up call. The appropriate response may be, like that of the guy who got slapped with after-shave in the television commercial, "Thanks, I needed that!"

How Science Works

Another Technology Review article33 examined some of the problems brought up in the Awake! article about U.S. government science institutions:

Science has become a profession: grants and research contracts are what it lives on. Whereas a rich dilettante like Lord Rayleigh could retire to his country estate and do acoustics or whatever else he wanted, modern scientists must sing for their supper. They do not sing to their patron, the U.S. taxpayer. They sing to other scientists, who wield over them the power of professional life and death via peer review.

Peer review, the evaluation of a specialist's work by others in the same field, is an inevitable consequence of specialization. Example: though anyone can tell if a bridge design is truly bad -- the bridge collapses -- it make sense to have other engineers check the plans before the bridge is built. Science uses peer review to determine which projects to pay for and which articles to publish, and, recently, to judge cases of alleged misconduct.

Peer review suggests trial by a jury of one's peers, a jewel in the crown of Western democracy -- surely an excellent model. But it takes more than a jury to have a fair trial. A lynch mob is also a peer panel. Rules and procedures -- jury selection, rules of evidence, the requirement that evidence be heard in public -- and a judge to interpret and enforce them are necessary if fallible people are to render fair decisions. Specialist peer review is fraught with biasing influences. Specialists compete with one another and, at the same time, fight collectively for their profession.

Peer review is at best a treacherous servant, but scientists often forget that a jury trial is more than a jury, and act as if the use of peers automatically sanctifies the resulting decisions. Establishment scientists have been treated well by peer review; scientific administrators use it. Both want to believe in it, and the need engenders beatification by faith. "Peer review is the distinguishing characteristic of science," they say. "It makes science what it is."

They are right -- in a way. Every scientist is an informal peer reviewer. A scientist's work affects science only if others accept it. But formal review of grant applications, manuscripts, and fraud allegations also makes science what it is, and here human failings can yield improper decisions whose practical consequences and poor ethics propagate throughout science.

Peer review resists investigation. Only insiders know the details of each decision. They may not tell the truth, and the technical background needed to extract the facts is hard for outsiders to learn. Lacking the omniscience of Orwell's Big Brother, we must be content with horror stories of reviewing gone wrong. Though such stories do not directly reveal the frequency of mistakes, they show which human failings are involved, and thus the likelihood of trouble and how to reduce it.

The federal government uses a variety of ways to decide how to fund science. Department of Defense (DOD) managers can fund whomever they like, without having to get advice. They do not compete for contracts with the scientists they might choose. Instead, they shine in the success of the programs they manage, and should something go wrong in a program, the manager is responsible. These are all good features. Unfortunately, managers are subject to agency politics....

At the National Science Foundation (NSF), too, managers make the final funding decisions but with the advice of peer reviewers. Managers benefit from the peers' specialized knowledge but have the authority to correct for peer bias. As at the Defense Department, should something go wrong, the program manager is responsible....

At the National Institutes of Health (NIH).... peer reviewers effectively make the final decisions; managers are nearly powerless. In each discipline, a peer panel -- the study section -- evaluates grant applications. By secret ballot, each panel member gives an application a numerical score, and these scores largely decide its fate. An upper, advisory council can fund projects slightly out of the order of their scores without attracting comment, as can program managers....

Since peer review puts a scientist's future at the mercy of competitors, is it any wonder that career issues are a respected, if unadmitted, influence on decisions? Would we not expect mutual assistance pacts to be accepted facts of life? Should we be surprised that politics is especially ripe in disciplines funded by NIH, where the power of scientists over one another is essentially unchecked?....

Politics is particularly bad in biomedical research because biomedical scientists directly control the flow of money that supports their disciplines. But even without politics, today's grant system, in which scientists propose future research projects to an agency, would be bad.... The great ideas in science in the next few years will be those not yet thought of. The system ought to select people likely to think them, but, alas, it is inherently biased against such speculation. Granting agencies want certainty, and reviewing peers fear unexpected discoveries by their competitors.

When peers referee journal articles, they perform a valuable service. They find mistakes and sometimes fraud, and they form a trial readership whose reactions show what to change to hold a reader's attention. A referee who knows the field can clarify what is and is not novel in a manuscript. Competent reviews take hours or days of hard work and are a tribute to those who do them.

Unfortunately, the power of referees, usually anonymous, permits self-interest, jealousy, revenge, and other unworthy motives to influence decisions.... Reviewing weeds out good manuscripts as well as poor ones....

The current attempt to deal with scientific fraud is science's first brush with formal self-regulation.

Self-regulation of any profession runs afoul of collective self-interest and pack loyalty. When disciplinary committees operate in secret, these influences have full rein. Need I enlarge on the ineffectiveness of the disciplining of doctors by doctors?....

Universities routinely use peer panels to investigate and judge fraud. This shifts responsibility but does not get justice done. A powerful accused scientist or pack solidarity can frighten a panel into seeing no evil....

Secrecy gives full rein to subterranean forces, and a major scientist can bring great force to bear. Panels at MIT, Tufts, and NIH all said, wrongly, that no misconduct was involved in a paper co-authored by Thereza Imanishi-Kari, Nobel laureate David Baltimore, and others. It is a matter of record that Baltimore used both a letter-writing campaign and professional lobbyists in an unsuccessful attempt to get Congress to halt Rep. John Dingell's.... investigation of the matter. (It was Rep. Dingell's investigation that finally forced NIH to mount a real investigation of its own.)

Media interest in the Baltimore affair is more than instinctive celebrity chasing. Fake work impedes progress much more if a major scientist is involved than otherwise, because others must pretend to agree with it if they want jobs or grants. I know of no attempt by other scientists to duplicate the precise experiments in the Baltimore affair. Scientists supposedly delight in proving one another wrong, but they hesitate to embarrass someone with power and the willingness to use it....

Compare NIH with NSF, where managers make the final decision about who gets funded. With responsibility comes accountability.... [certain] decisions show that NSF has power. If NSF wanted a university to investigate a fraud, the school would remember the movability of laboratories before doing a whitewash. Perhaps this power is reflected in the apparent lack of fraud in the parts of science NSF funds.

The article goes on to make recommendations on reforming the peer review system. How much more edifying this is than Awake!'s treatment of problems in the halls of science. It also gives one a better feel for the issues Awake! prefers to leave out.

Denigrating Science

A series of four articles appeared in the January 22, 1990 Awake!, dealing with fraud in science. Given the above material from calmer voices, note that the Awake! material takes on a less strident perspective.

The first article simply lists a number of misdeeds by scientists. The second article says that competition in certain branches of science can be fierce, there can be lots of pressure to publish papers, sometimes this results in cheating, and now some of the cheating is coming to light. This article illustrates the way the Society often takes quotations out of context, and therefore distorts their meaning. Under the sub-heading "Peer Review, a Safeguard Against Fraud?" on page 7, Awake! said:

Editors of science journals often -- but not always -- submit papers to other scientists for review before publishing them. This practice, called peer review, theoretically weeds out erroneous and fraudulent articles. "Science is self-correcting in a way that no other field of intellectual endeavor can match," Isaac Asimov says. "Science is self-policing in a way that no other field is." He marveled that "scandal is so infrequent."

But many others do not share this view. Peer review is "a lousy way to detect fraud," said previously quoted Dr. Drummond Rennie....

Note that Asimov mentioned nothing about peer review as the means by which science is self-correcting or self-policing. Awake! is putting words into his mouth. Asimov is here speaking of science as a global body of knowledge about the physical world, whereas all the references to peer review are talking about science institutions in the U.S. or specific journal articles. What the context of Asimov's statements would show is that he is speaking of the long term manner in which science, as a body of knowledge, is self-correcting. He means that eventually, if other workers would try to duplicate or build on incorrect or fraudulent results, they would find out and correct the situation. Sometimes that may take a long time, but the truth eventually will be found. In the case of Piltdown Man, the fraud took forty years to be exposed, but exposed it was because it did not fit with other evidence. The Awake! writer may not understand the distinctions, or perhaps he is trying to obfuscate the issue.

Paleontologist Niles Eldredge commented on the long term self-correcting nature of science. After describing the idealized notion science philosopher Karl Popper advanced as the way things ought to be in science, he said:34

In the real world, in the competitive fray that is science, data forging, plagiarism and all manner of base and venal but utterly human failings make a mockery of the counterimage of detached objectivity. Such pure, dispassionate, cold logic is rare -- though more common, one assumes, than the cheating of its opposite extreme. But no scientist, at least any worthy of the name, can be expected to sit back calmly and devise still more critical tests for a pet idea (though when he or she is emotionally attached to a theory it behooves our scientist to make sure that all the avenues of obvious "refutation" of the system are well understood). But scientists, as individuals, do argue in favor the the "truth" of this or that favored proposition -- on the face of it not a very scientific mode of behavior in strict Popperian terms....

Where Popper's views and the actual day-to-day workings of science coincide is in the collective effort. Science is competitive; it is, as Popper says, a collision of ideas with observations. If not all individual scientists can be paragons of disinterest in the ultimate fate of their ideas, if instead they tend to cling to favored notions sometimes in the face of rather plain evidence to the contrary...., it is of no particular import. Science needs its advocates of definite points of view. It is someone else who will blow the whistle; someone who, far from committed to an idea, may just as emotionally be opposed to it -- or to its proponents. It is the rivals who can be counted on to falsify an hypothesis, to claim that someone else's pet idea just doesn't square with the evidence of our senses.

Evolution Versus Creation

The last two articles in the Awake! series attack the theory of evolution. Evolution is considered by most members of the biological sciences to be as well established as the fact that the earth goes around the sun. Awake! justifiably attacks this attitude, but in so doing it clouds issues more than it clears them, and shows again the scientific ignorance of the Society.

Why do I say this? First, one must define what one means by "evolution." For many, evolution and Darwin's theory are identical, but the fact is that there are many theories of evolution. There is also the general idea of evolution, apart from any theory, as simply being the observation from the fossil record that life has changed progressively since it first appeared. This is not in dispute, as the Society readily admits under the proper circumstances. The fossil record shows life forms, even entire categories of life forms, appearing suddenly, existing for a long time, and just as suddenly disappearing. The dispute among most people, excepting six-literal-day creationists, is not whether evolution in this broad sense occurred, but is about the mechanisms of this evolution. It should be noted that Genesis allows for God creating everything progressively, as it assigns no chronology to creation.

Awake! here seems unaware of this distinction, as the writer is intent on demolishing evolution. He presents little factual evidence in the articles, but instead quotes what others say as to the factualness of evolution. He refers the reader to the Society's book Life -- How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation ?, but this book is itself an outstanding example of misdirection.

Awake! quotes author Stephen J. Gould as saying many times in one article that "evolution is a fact". By reading the article one can see that Gould is sometimes talking about evolution in the broad sense, and sometimes about the mechanisms of evolution. But Awake! just lumps it all together. Also quoted is biologist Michael Denton, who wrote one of the best critiques of Darwinism I've read. On page 9 Awake! said:

Molecular biologist Michael Denton referred to this glib talk about evolution's being a fact and dismissed it with these words: "Now of course such claims are simply nonsense." It's much more than nonsense. It's fraud. It deceives and misrepresents. It perverts the truth to induce another to part with something of value.

Here is the context of what Denton said.35 Judge for yourself whether Awake! is able to distinguish fact from theory.

[Darwin's] general theory, that all life on earth had originated and evolved by a gradual successive accumulation of fortuitous mutations, is still, as it was in Darwin's time, a highly speculative hypothesis entirely without direct factual support and very far from that self-evident axiom some of its more aggressive advocates would have us believe.

The fact that every journal, academic debate and popular discussion assumes the truth of Darwinian theory tends to reinforce its credibility enormously. This is bound to be so because, as sociologists of knowledge are at pains to point out, it is by conversation in the broadest sense of the word that our views and conceptions of reality are maintained and therefore the plausibility of any theory or world view is largely dependent upon the social support it receives rather than its empirical content or rational consistency. Thus the all pervasive affirmation of the validity of Darwinian theory has had the inevitable effect of raising its status into an impregnable axiom which could not even conceivably be wrong.

It is not surprising that, in the context of such an overwhelming social consensus, many biologists are confused as to the true status of the Darwinian paradigm and are unaware of its metaphysical basis. As the following quote from Julian Huxley at a conference in 1959 makes clear:

The first point to make about Darwin's theory is that it is no longer a theory but a fact... Darwinianism has come of age so to speak. We are no longer having to bother about establishing the fact of evolution ...

Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, is even more emphatic, for him:

The theory is about as much in doubt as the earth goes round the sun.

Now of course such claims are simply nonsense. For Darwin's model of evolution is still very much a theory and still very much in doubt when it comes to macroevolutionary phenomena. Furthermore being basically a theory of historical reconstruction, it is impossible to verify by experiment or direct observation as is normal in science. Recently the philosophical status of evolutionary claims has been the subject of considerable debate. Philosophers such as Sir Karl Popper have raised doubts as to whether evolutionary claims, by their very nature incapable of falsification, can properly be classed as truly scientific hypotheses. Moreover, the theory of evolution deals with a series of unique events, the origin of life, the origin of intelligence and so on. Unique events are unrepeatable and cannot be subjected to any sort of experimental investigation. Such events, whether they be the origin of the universe or the origin of life, may be the subject of much fascinating and controversial speculation, but their causation can, strictly speaking, never be subject to scientific validation.

Furthermore, not only is the theory incapable of proof by normal scientific means, the evidence is, as we shall see in the next few chapters, far from compelling.

Denton is clearly talking about Darwin's particular theory, not evolution in the broad sense. Denton also hits upon the key theme of the evolution/creation debate. What people believe about how the universe came about is fundamentally a subjective decision based upon criteria other than demonstrable proof. The strict evolutionist believes that all natural phenomena must be explained without reference to supernatural causes. The strict Bible student believes that the God of the Bible put the universe in motion. Both are beliefs not subject to outside verification. Awake! is unaware of the parallels.

What does the fossil record actually show?36 In rare cases a series of fossils is found that is consistent with the continuous gradual change Darwin predicted, but species generally remain stable for long periods of time. Many evolutionists are coming to grips with the fact that the evidence for Darwin's theory of progressive gradual change of one species into another is not generally found in the fossil record. Darwin also realized this and postulated that the fossil record was too poor to show the transitional forms he expected. He predicted that ultimately these forms would be found.

Within the last two decades many evolutionists have given credence to a new theory, called punctuated equilibrium. This theory was first advanced in 1972 by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, in an attempt to account for the lack of evidence of gradual change while retaining the basic notion that evolution had occurred and could be explained. Niles Eldredge, in The Myths of Human Evolution, said of the search for these forms since Darwin's time:37

Paleontologists just were not seeing the expected changes in their fossils as they pursued them up through the rock record. Instead, collections of nearly identical specimens, separated in some cases by 5 million years, suggested that the overwhelming majority of animal and plant species were tremendously conservative throughout their histories.... it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction was wrong.

The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way. Rather than challenge well-entrenched evolutionary theory, paleontologists tacitly agreed with their zoological colleagues that the fossil record was too poor to do much with beyond supporting, in a general sort of way, the basic thesis that life had evolved. Only recently has a substantial number of paleontologists blown the whistle and started to look at the evolutionary implications of the marked pattern of nonchange -- of stability -- within species so dominant in the fossil record of life.

.... in the vast majority of cases.... [species] have remained substantially unchanged through monumentally long periods of time. Species, in other words, seem to be relatively static. There is frequently more variation throughout the geographic spread of a species at any one point in time than will be accrued through a span of 5 million or 10 million years.

This observation has two simple consequences, both of tremendous importance to evolutionary theory. First, Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.

The second simple consequence is the observation that species are stable and remain discrete, in time as well as space. They are individuals in the true sense of the word: they have beginnings, histories, and, ultimately, ends.

So species themselves tend to remain stable, but what about all the change that is supposed to have occurred? The Myths of Human Evolution says:38

.... the overall picture presented by the fossil record confirms the most basic predictions we can make to test the very notion of evolution: if all organisms are related by a process of ancestry and descent, older rocks should contain more primitive members of a group than younger rocks. We should be able to document progressively more advanced forms as we look in correspondingly younger rocks. This is what we find.

But this very confirmation of the most basic of evolutionary predictions has led us astray. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the usual conception casts evolution as a gradual, steady process of adaptive change. And we have already seen that the fossil record conflicts with that view. Now let's look at the fossil record to see what patterns of evolutionary change are actually there. The general agreement that older rocks produce more primitive fossils and that as we look in younger rocks we usually find more advanced members of an evolving lineage has been taken as sufficient evidence that the evolution of life is fundamentally a process of gradual, progressive, adaptive change. But when we take a second, harder look at the fossil record we begin to see the truly mythic qualities of this story. For the gross patterns of evolutionary change so abundantly documented in the fossil record could have been produced in a number of different ways. We are faced more with a great leap of faith -- that gradual, progressive, adaptive change underlies the general pattern of evolutionary change we see in the rocks -- than any hard evidence. In fact, a closer look at the fossil record shows that another view, centering around the evolution, stability, and death of individual species, predicts a pattern of change that fits the facts of the fossil record much more closely.

The notion of gradual, progressive change collides head-on with the stability seen in most fossil species, for the general progressive sequence of life's evolutionary history seen in the fossil record has always been taken as confirmation of the underlying assumption that all change comes from progressive generation-by-generation modification of species. What the record is really telling us is that evolution, as suspected, has occurred. But we have greatly erred in predicting what the pattern of change should look like in the fossil record. Rather than taking the record literally, we have dismissed the lack of change within species as merely the artifacts of an imperfect record. But the time has come to ask, instead, if the record isn't telling us something that our theories ought to be able to explain -- rather than explain away.

Summarizing all the above, the fossil record shows discernable trends from species to species, but little evidence of change within species. Eldredge proposes the theory of punctuated equilibrium to account for the observations. Punctuated equilibrium has problems, however, since it does not explain how large scale changes actually come about, but in essence, merely acknowledges that this sort of change exists.

As the reader can see, there is far more to the issue of evolution than is evident in reading Awake! It simplifies and obscures the real issues so much that its readers are left in the dark. The Society focuses on the fact that the "how" of evolution is not well established, and from that generalizes that all the evidence for evolution is not established. This is fallacious reasoning. The Myths of Human Evolution again makes relevant comments:39

Some of the most mythic of scientific notions lie in the realm of evolutionary biology. Evolution -- the proposition that all organisms are related -- is as highly verified a thesis as can be found in science. Subjected to close scrutiny from all angles for over a century now, evolution emerges as the only naturalistic explanation we have of the twin patterns of similarity and diversity that pervade all life. The basic notion that life has evolved is as certain as the existence of gravity or the idea that the earth is spheroidal. We call such highly verified notions "facts" when they consistently escape all attempts to prove them false. Evolution is no myth.

But how life has evolved is another matter entirely. Our standard expectation of evolution -- slow, steady, gradual improvement, hence change, through time -- is indeed a myth.

The aforementioned Awake! articles emphasize the point that evolution is a fraud. The heading on page 8 said:

Fraud is defined as "an act of deceiving or misrepresenting." It is the "intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value."

A Matter of Attitude

As this booklet has shown, Watchtower Society publications often meet this description. Authors are quoted out of context, author's statements are turned around to make them say what they had not intended, important information is left out, information is used selectively, past mistakes are glossed over, publication indexes are doctored to omit past mistakes. Need I go on? I've set forth at least one example of each of the above in this booklet, as well as many other abuses. When Watchtower writers deal with evolution or any other matter they should strictly adhere to the whole truth, even if it is distasteful. Anything less dishonors the God of the Bible and disproves the Society's claim to speak for him.

The Society's handling of scientific material is often similar to what is described in The Noah's Ark Nonsense:40

Ark enthusiasts, like fundamentalists in general, have difficulty in deciding whether they are for or against science, and for or against scientists. When a scientist makes a statement they can use to support their views, they gladly cite him as a scientist. They often regard their own views as "scientific.".... [When it is convenient,] science is held in honor and there is an effort to identify with it.... But when scientists disagree with their views, the ark people tend to disparage scientists in general.

The November 22, 1991 Awake! article said on page 15:

Scientists are unhappy if anyone outside the scientific community passes judgment on their activities. They are adamant that they, not outsiders and certainly not government agencies, are the ones who should judge their own cases where misconduct or fraud is charged. But anyone within the scientific community who dares to raise questions against prominent members may fare badly....

Substitute the words "Jehovah's Witnesses" for "scientists" above and you again have a true statement.

The January 22, 1990 Awake! article said on page 15:

Alice, in the tale Through the Looking-Glass, incredulous at the strange logic of the White Queen, could only laugh. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things." The queen responded: "I dare say you haven't had much practice. When I was your age I did it for half an hour a day. Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Evolutionists are the White Queens of today. They have had infinite practice in believing impossible things.

I agree that evolutionists believe impossible things with regard to the origin of new forms of life. But substitute the words "Jehovah's Witnesses" for "evolutionists" above and you have yet another true statement. The Watchtower Society has published reams of material attempting to show that its religious interpretations of the Bible have more weight than the observations of scientists. In many cases the Society makes claims about what science says that are quite outlandish. In other cases it ignores huge amounts of evidence that is hardly more than simple observation, to hold on to views that are not even those of the Bible, but are instead Watchtower Society traditions. In doing so the Society shows a cavalier disregard for the truth.

Conclusion

An observation of Steve Allen's hit home regarding what I've already said about the Society's method of arguing and handling in print difficulties with the Bible.41

I have noted that fundamentalists argue unfairly. For the most part they deny problems of interpretation, simply asserting that the Bible says what it means and means what it says. When, however, it is demonstrated that portions of Scripture flatly contradict each other, then the fundamentalist promptly qualifies his original assertion and interprets to his heart's content.

The examples I've included in this booklet, such as the difficulties with Revelation 6:8, show the truth of this assertion.

When fundamentalists encounter almost any criticism of either the Scriptures or their church, they also respond by interpreting the observations as anti-God. "How dare you," they ask, "presume to pit your merely human intellect against that of God?"

The answer, of course, is that (1) if there is a God and (2) he did indeed share with us the benefits of his all-wise mind, then (3) it would be the height of insanity to contradict any aspect of the divine philosophy. But when the fundamentalist is asked how he knows that one particular opinion or another represents the view of God, he responds by saying that the divine message came to us in the form of the Bible.

How many times have I read just this sort of statement in the Society's literature? Especially note what I've said on the subjects of how the Society views material it publishes and of how it views elders. Allen continues:

The entire Bible? Yes, beyond question. His entire case rests on the Bible being the literal word of God. Unfortunately he often attempts to prove this, as regards one portion of Scripture, by referring to some other portion. This puts him in the obviously untenable position of trying to prove the Bible from the Bible.

The Society has often argued this way. Jesus is quoted to prove the Flood occurred, Paul is quoted to prove the Bible is inspired, and on, and on. The sad part is that this is often done after a presentation of other evidence that is so weak the writer realizes he has to resort to quoting the Bible to salvage any credibility at all.

An amusing example of this sort of argument comes from Science and Creationism,42 quoting an article that originally appeared in Harper's Magazine, April, 1982. The article was about the 1981 constitutionality trial in Little Rock, Arkansas, of Act 590, the "Balanced Treatment of Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act." The state of Arkansas was trying to uphold the constitutionality of the Act:

The state's most coherent witness by far was Dr. Norman Geisler of the Dallas Theological Seminary.... The most profound part of Geisler's testimony was his attempt to prove that the "Creator" of the universe and life mentioned in Act 590 was not an inherently religious concept. After citing Aristotle, Plato, and one or two other classical philosophers who supposedly believed in a God or gods without worshiping them -- albeit not as creators of the world "from nothing" -- Geisler offered his most thundering proof: the Epistle of James. He cited a line of Scripture to the effect that Satan acknowledges God, but chooses not to worship Him. "The Devil," he said, "believes that there is a God." Whee! If Geisler has not yet squared the circle in his meditations, he has at least, well, circled it. Who would have thought one could prove the Creator a nonreligious idea by means of hearsay evidence from Beelzebub? After unloading that bombshell, Geisler, too, hastened to face the cameras in the courtroom hallway. "We don't rule out stones from a geology class just because some people have worshiped stones, and we don't rule God out of science class because some believe in him." As I listened to Geisler I could not help but recall the words of the Rev. C. O. Magee, a Presbyterian minister who is a member of the Little Rock School Board. "Any time religion gets involved in science," Magee told the Gazette, "religion comes off looking like a bunch of nerds.... The Book of Genesis told who created the world and why it was created and science tells how it was done." Amen.

I wonder how many people who write Watchtower publications actually feel the way the minister expressed himself above. The December 15, 1991 Watchtower, pages 22-24, discussed the situation faced by Galileo when up against the Catholic Church, and said:

"The Bible teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go," said the 16th-century Italian scientist and inventor Galileo Galilei.... Galileo believed that creation is governed by laws that men can learn through study. The Catholic Church opposed this view.... What do we learn from Galileo's experience? A Christian should realize that the Bible is not a science textbook. When a conflict appears to exist between the Bible and science, he need not try to reconcile every "discrepancy." After all, Christian faith is based on "the word about Christ," not on scientific authority. Besides, science is continually changing. A theory that appears to contradict the Bible and that is popular today may tomorrow be discovered to be in error and be rejected.

Those rather general statements about faith may be true, but it is also true that the Bible and one's religion have to accomodate matters that have been well established scientifically.

In fact, although the Bible makes many comments on many subjects, it rarely touches on "scientific" topics. Very often things that are at one time considered "scientific" gradually become so well accepted that they become "everyday" things. For example, the Bible does not comment on the fact that the earth goes around the sun (though the Catholic Church once said it did, and The Flat Earth Society still claims it does), but this once esoteric idea is now thoroughly commonplace. Likewise, the Bible makes no direct comment on many other things that the Society claims it does, such as some of the topics discussed in this booklet.

The Watchtower article said of the Catholic church hierarchy,

Galileo's new ideas.... challenged their reputation and power.... As biographer L. Geymonat points out in his book Galileo Galilei: "Narrow-minded theologians who wanted to limit science on the basis of biblical reasoning would do nothing but cast discredit upon the Bible itself." For selfish reasons stubborn men did exactly that.

Unless the Bible makes a direct statement on a "scientific" subject it would be wise to take scientists seriously, or risk taking on the position of Galileo's tormenters or looking like a bunch of nerds or even discrediting the Bible itself. Subscribing to certain Bible interpretations merely because they have become traditional does no one justice. Playing loose with truth opens the door to ridicule, as the following example illustrates:43

A long acquaintance with the literature of the Witnesses leads one to the conclusion that they live in the intellectual 'twilight zone.' That is, most of their members, even their leaders, are not well educated and not very intelligent. Whenever their literature strays onto the fields of philosophy, academic theology, science or any severe mental discipline their ideas at best mirror popular misconceptions, at worst they are completely nonsensical.

No one should want to be included among those described by Jean-Paul Sartre as ones who, "since they are afraid of reasoning.... want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found."44

Footnotes

1 Aid to Bible Understanding, p. 1551, under the article "Star," refers to the Hebrew and Greek words for "star. These terms are applied in a general sense to any luminous body in space, excepting the sun and moon, for which other names are used."

2 The Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures, p. 797, Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, New York, 1969.

3 The New Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1984.

4 Aid to Bible Understanding, p. 37, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1971.

5 My copy of The New Scofield Reference Bible, 1967 edition, says in the marginal note, "Many hold that this verse alludes to the sphericity of the earth." The original Scofield Reference Bible was produced by a man totally convinced of its inspiration. This reference is no more to be taken at face value in its subjective judgements than the Watchtower Society.

6 Laurie R. Godfrey, Scientists Confront Creationism, p. 290, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1983.

7 Isaac Asimov, Beginnings, p. 238, Walker and Company, New York, 1987.

8 The New Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1984.

9 Francis Brown, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament of William Gesenius, p. 295, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988.

10 Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, p. 210, MacMillan Publishing Company, New York, 1987.

11 The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 5, p. 410, Abingdon Press, New York, 1956.

12 The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 5, Abingdon Press, New York, 1956.

13 Ibid, Vol. 4, p. 832.

14 The Watchtower, p. 23, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, December 15, 1991.

15 Ibid, Vol. 3, p. 1094.

16 The Watchtower, op. cit., p. 11, October 1, 1980.

17 Life -- How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation ?, p. 28, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1985.

18 Awake!, p. 8, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, October 8, 1982.

19 Ibid, p. 28, January 8, 1983.

20 Ibid, p. 11, October 8, 1982.

21 Technology Review, p. 15, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January, 1992.

22 Theodore W. Pietsch and David B. Grobecker, Scientific American, New York, June, 1990.

23 George Gaylord Simpson, Fossils and the History of Life, p. 17, Scientific American Books, 1983.

24 Briggs 24 Mark A. S. McMenamin, "The Emergence of Animals," Scientific American, pp. 100-101, New York, April, 1987.

25 John H. Ostrom, "A New Look At Dinosaurs," National Geographic Magazine, pp. 152-185, Washington, D.C., August, 1978.

26 John H. Ostrom, "Archaeopteryx and the Origin of Flight," The Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 49, No. 1, p. 39, March 1974.

27 Don Lessem, Kings of Creation, p. 90, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992.

28 Rick Gore, "Dinosaurs," National Geographic Magazine, vol. 183, No.1, p. 14,24, Washington, D.C., January, 1993.

29 Niles Eldredge & Ian Tattersal, The Myths of Human Evolution, pp. 1-2, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982.

30 Life -- How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation?, p. 121, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, 1985.

31 Awake!, p. 12, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., Brooklyn, NY, November 22, 1991.

32 Steven J. Marcus, "A Splash of Cold Water," Technology Review, p. 5, Cambridge, Massachusetts, November/December 1991.

33 Charles W. McCutchen, "Peer Review: Treacherous Servant, Disastrous Master," Technology Review, pp. 29-40, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 1991.

34 Niles Eldredge, Time Frames, p. 47, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1985.

35 Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, pp. 74-77, Adler & Adler, Publisher, Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, 1985.

36 A balanced view of what the fossil record contains and its relation to evolution and creation is presented in The Status of Evolution as a Scientific Theory, Robert C. Newman, et. al., Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute, Hatfield, Pennsylvania, Research Report No. 37, 1990.

37 Niles Eldredge & Ian Tattersal, The Myths of Human Evolution, pp. 45-48, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982.

38 Ibid., p. 57.

39 Ibid., p. 2.

40 Howard M. Teeple, The Noah's Ark Nonsense, p. 121, Religion and Ethics Institute, Inc., Evanston, Illinois, 1978.

41 Steve Allen, Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, & Morality, pp. 159-160, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York, 1990.

42 Ashley Montagu, ed., Science and Creationism, p. 359, Oxford University Press, New York, 1984.

43 Alan Rogerson, Millions Now Living Will Never Die: A Study of Jehovah's Witnesses, p. 116, Constable, London, 1969.

44 Walter Kaufman, Existentialism, Religion, and Death: Thirteen Essays, New American Library, New York, 1976.

Index · Copyright © 1998 Alan Feuerbacher · https://corior.blogspot.com/2006/02/science.html