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When Shem and Ham and Japheth Played Tag with Dinosaurs on the Boat


Bill Nye, the Science Guy,
and Ken Ham, the Turtle Talk Guy,
had a public debate about
which millenium we are living in:
this one, or the magical-mystery one,
when dinosaurs played tag
with Shem and Ham and Japheth.

It brought to mind what happens
when Jehovah's Witnesses show up at the door
and ask for your opinion about the end of the world:
whether it will be next Tuesday or Wednesday,
and ask if your Ascension Robe is ironed.

 The Science Guy or the Turtle Talk Guy.

 Turtle Talk guys get their information 
from what people used to think;
almost always from old religious books.
It doesn't matter what the subject is:
if the book was written in the 17th century,
it will be expressed in 17th century terms,
and will reflect the worldview of the 17th century,
at the latest, and perhaps of an even earlier time.
If people then believed in a three-storied universe,
the ideas will be three stories tall.
If the earth is flat, and rests on the back
of a Great Turtle, you might call it Turtle Talk.

And what do we do, instead?
We talk about an ancient universe
beginning with a monstrous explosion,
of amazing lengths of time and expanding space.
We speak of particle physics, and evolution,
and of what we are learning, every day;
of genes, and water on Mars, and dark matter.

We explore.
That is how we know what we know:
we explore.

We hypothesize, and test the theses,
form theories, and pinch and poke
and peer at everything, merciless
in our desire to know what is the case.

It might be that finally understanding
how long is time and how huge is space
are keys to the difference between
Turtle Talk and the language of science.

Nobody can build a boat big enough
to hold every living thing, or even
a couple of representatives of each:
not Noah, not Ken Ham, not Odin
and Poseidon, and Coyote the Creator,
all together, or apart.

Nothing in our heads can comfortably hold
how long is time, or the dimensions of space.
We have to invent mathematical symbols.
We live threescore years and ten,
and sometimes, by reason of good luck,
fourscore years, and we speak of distance
in terms of how long it takes light to come from there.
It takes eight minutes for light to come
from the sun, we say, and that is about
93,000,000 miles away, as if by pickup truck.
And then we speak of light that has come
from thirteen billion light years away!

"Time," the Jehovah's Witnesses at the door say,
"is six thousand years old."  And Ken Ham says
everybody got on the boat and went sailing
while the earth made one revolution around the sun,
and the Great Turtle took a break from
keeping everything afloat.

That's the difference.




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