Space For Doubt

The realm of religious apologetics seems to be one full of anxiety. They never know when a new discovery will throw a wrench in some dogma they hold. A wrench that requires inventing a new argument to “disprove” it.

They have to contrive complicated hypothetical arguments on the regular, in order to combat logical inconsistencies and scientific discoveries. The problem in doing this, is they always create additional problems that also then need to be solved.

As I was listening to a podcast on Genesis today, a light bulb came on and I thought of a good example to share here. I want to show how complicated things get when you attempt a literal reading of a very non-literal text.

Let’s start with creation first.

Then God said, “Let the earth produce living creatures according to their kind: livestock and crawling things and animals of the earth according to their kind”; and it was so. ²⁵ God made the animals of the earth according to their kind, and the livestock according to their kind, and everything that crawls on the ground according to its kind; and God saw that it was good. – Genesis 1:24-25 NASB

We see that God made every creature according to their kind. Sounds great. Keep that in mind for later!

One of the biggest problems we have with the ark story, is that the ark was simply not big enough to hold all the animal species (not to mention the food and water issue). Even many ardent traditional Biblical literalists will support this notion, albeit with one caveat.

And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. – Genesis 6:19 NASB

They say that only one “kind” of animal was brought on the ark. Even the Ark Museum’s own website shows this:

Basically what they’re saying is that one pair of proto-typical “dog” or “cat” was on the ark. From that pair, all other species of canine or feline emerged.

[Interesting note here if you’re SDA. EGW says “every species was preserved on the ark.” That’s a real problem you’ve got there guys. Even the Ark Museum is like “ya….there definitely wasn’t enough room for all of that.” SDA’s can’t retroject the “kind” excuse as what she meant, as by her day, the taxonomic definitions were well established. She also says “every species” quite clearly.]

It’s here where these literalists start creating problems for themselves. Let’s use cats as our example case.

Let’s start with the Genesis 1 problem. The author uses this same “kind” to refer to the animals God made. In that case, if they want to be consistent with their terms, God only made one pair of proto-typical cat pair for Adam to name and have dominion over.

From that pair, all other pairs of cats presumably were descended in very short order (what with the fossils we have and all). It really flies in the face of reason, but ok. Let’s go with that.

So God only created the primal pair of each set of animals during creation. They then multiply and spread out, rapidly turning into different species. At this point each species would have its own unique genetics not shared with other species of the same family. This is true regardless of whether or not God created ONLY the primal pair, or if He created each species as well during creation.

Here’s the problem. When God called one pair of these cats to come back on the ark, which species did He select?

Whichever one He selects has to become the new ancestor for all post-flood cat species.

If He called the Rusty Spotted Cat from Asia, that weighs roughly 3 lb (world’s smallest wild cat), it would be hard to see getting a 400 lb lion back into the rotation from that post-flood interbreeding extravaganza.

Likewise, if He called the 400 lb lion, it would be hard to see the genetics in place to create the 3 lb Rusty Spotted cat post-flood.

Here’s the other problem.

If we assume that whatever cat pair was present on the ark was responsible for all post-flood cats, we would need to get around 40 types of feline species virtually immediately.

Our radiological dating science can date remains of cats, and we can see remains of these cats across the world. Since flood adherents would dismiss anything that dates to before the flood, we could simply choose all of the discoveries that date to, say, ~100 years or so after the flood.

These cats would have to get busy and get moving immediately! They’d have to swim across some oceans, hurry up and get into Siberia, the jungles of Asia, the mountains and jungles of South America.

Virtually every offspring would have to be another species, with its own instincts, inclinations, food preferences, and survival skills.

That doesn’t sound very logical does it? Here’s where it gets even more unreasonable.

If that is indeed what happened, why did it stop? Why did this intense rapid explosion of species just….stop? For thousands of years now it has not progressed any further to any significant degree. Did God look down and say “Yep. That’s enough cats!” and hit the off-switch on this process?

All of these problems are created simply by forcing the text to be literal, and then having to make apologist arguments for how that can be true. You are letting your dogma dictate what the truth is allowed to be.

Please. Please. Please. Can we stop doing this yet? I’m happy to play counter-apologist all day, but wow. Just wow. We need to do a better job of educating our kids.

Peace.