You Can’t Get Rid of God With Science

This week I received a copy of Testament, which is a video series created by a historian named John Romer. It aired in the late 1980’s. I enjoyed it the first time around, so I wanted to see it again.

Romer has a very engaging way of speaking. Every word and gesture are planned. He makes you feel as if everything he said were a staggering revelation of enormous importance. I know I’m not the only one who enjoys watching him, because dinosaur expert Robert Bakker has done a series of his own, and he imitates Romer with extraordinary faithfulness. It’s almost as if he’s making fun of him, but he’s very serious.

I’ll post two videos so you can see what I mean. First, Romer.

Now, Bakker.

Now that I think about it, it’s funny that Bakker would model his manner of presentation after Romer’s, because they’re in the same basic line of work. They look at old objects and present their opinions on them, in ways that appear intended to refute the Bible.

When I was a kid, I sometimes misused the word “archaeologist.” Somehow I got the idea that “archaeologist”–the name for a person who studies distant human history–was also the right name for paleontologists, who study distant plant and animal history. The fields have a lot of similarity.

When I was in college (the first time), I studied vertebrate anatomy as part of my ill-fated effort to be come a doctor. The professor who taught the class was one Walter Bock. He was wonderful. He talked about bones and joints and weird characteristics of animals. Each of us got a box of cat bones, a dead cat, and a dead shark to dissect. I loved it.

One of my lab T.A.’s was a guy named Neil Shubin. Years later, I saw him on TV, telling people about dinosaurs. I guess he went full-throttle paleontologist. It’s kind of a neat career. I don’t think paleontologists have to be as smart as biologists who work with plasmids and pipettes, and I doubt they get as much respect from scientists, but they get to go on digs and build cool museum displays kids love.

Well, I’m wrong. He’s an evolutionary biologist. Apparently, he has become somewhat famous. He wrote a bestseller. Here he is on Youtube.

We had a fascinating textbook, which, coincidentally, was written by a man named Romer. I don’t know if it was great science, but it was interesting. I recall reading that spiders use blood pressure to extend their legs.

I wish I still had that book. Somehow it vanished. Maybe I’ll get a new copy.

Real, hard core science is all calculus. Kids don’t know that. They grow up thinking it’s all like the Discovery Channel. The neat thing about vertebrate anatomy (and similar topics) is that it really is like the Discovery Channel. You don’t have to be Johnny von Neumann to study it and enjoy it. You don’t even need to be a high school graduate. The lectures Professor Bock gave were not much harder to understand than TV shows.

I did a terrible thing with the cat. We didn’t need the whole cat for our work, so I took the tail from mine and inserted it in a hole in the button panel in one of my dorm’s elevators. For some reason, a button was missing. When my work was done, it looked as if a cat had been sucked into the panel, but for its tail.

I was a real idiot back then.

He was an orange tabby, if anyone cares. No; she. We had to become familiar with our cats’ entire bodies, and I recall examing the parts that established her gender.

Wow; Professor Bock is still working. He must be a thousand years old. He still has a page on Columbia’s site.

He was an ornithologist. Sometimes he would show up for lectures fresh from the field, with his pants pulled up over his boots. He worked in Schermerhorn, one of Columbia’s neatest buildings. It was a perfect picture of an early 20th-Century science building. It was full of jars containing pickled snakes and other creatures. They had an extinct Tasmanian tiger in a jar.

These days, the antique jars themselves would probably be worth more than the contents. I can see hipsters buying them to hold their homemade, locally sourced, non-GMO pemmican. Or whatever it is they eat.

Unfortunately, my parents drove me nuts while I was in college, so I did not complete the course. I tried twice, but I was a basket case.

Romer (not the book guy) starts his series with Abraham, and he devotes a lot of time to “debunking” the Bible. For example, he says Abraham could not have had camels, because they didn’t show up in the Middle East until 500 BC. He goes on like this throughout the series.

He loves saying there is no evidence of the Hebrews or God until pretty late in the archaeological record. What he doesn’t say is that archaeologists don’t have a perfect record. He draws a lot of definite conclusions about what does and does not exist, based on excavations covering what surely has to be less than a hundredth of a percent of the relevant landscape.

He finally admits evidence of the Hebrews exists when he gets to the palace of Omri, father of Ahab. Here’s the question he doesn’t ask himself: if Omri was a Hebrew, did he come from nowhere? If Omri was a Hebrew, then his father was a Hebrew, and his grandfather was a Hebrew, and they came from a people who were Hebrews. Omri didn’t just wake up one morning and say, “I suddenly feel Jewish. Let’s start an ethnic group and a religion. Someone start smoking salmon!”

Omri was a descendant of Jeroboam I, who stole half of the kingdom of David when Solomon died. He is believed to have been born somewhere around 900 BC. David is believed to have ruled during an era somewhere around 1000 BC. Moses is thought to have left Egypt around 300 years earlier.

Moses to Omri…~400 years. That’s not a terribly long gestation period for a people. It stands to reason that Omri’s people existed in the time of Moses.

Aside from that, Moses himself seems legitimate. His name is believed to be Egyptian, not Hebrew. Joseph, who established the Jewish connection with Egypt, seems legitimate. Romer himself says the Bible’s description of him is consistent with what we know of Egyptian officials of his time, right down to his wardrobe.

Romer’s series devotes time to the City of David, which is a well-known archaeological site in Jerusalem. Romer claims there is no evidence David existed. Well, his series was released in 1988. Since then, archaeologists have found evidence of David in other countries. An ancient king claimed he had defeated kings from David’s line. There is also strong evidence of a Jewish outpost on Elephantine Island in Egypt, dating back to about 500 BC. There is a temple there with two stars of David carved on it.

One wonders what evidence Romer was looking for when he visited the City of David. Did he hope to find a bronze plaque in English, reading, “This is the City of David, second king of the Hebrews,” along with a vial of blood for DNA testing?

Romer also talks about the compilation of the Hebrew Bible, and he uses a very deceptive word: “versions.” He says the people who hid the Dead Sea Scrolls in order to preserve the Bible wrote many “versions.” That’s incorrect. They wrote many “copies” or “editions.” “Version” implies a difference in the text, and the Hebrew Bible is famous for its consistency throughout history. Look at it this way: if I own two King James Bibles from different publishers, I own two editions but only one version.

Romer’s slander is a lot like the one we hear from some Jews, concerning the New Testament. I was told that over 20,000 “versions” of the New Testament had been found. I looked into the story, and what I actually saw was that they were copies, not versions. They were consistent. The story didn’t debunk the New Testament; it supported its legitimacy.

Here’s how I feel about historical and scientific arguments about the veracity of the Bible: they will be resolved in time, in favor of the text. Maybe the word translated “camels” in Abraham’s story was a general term meaning “beasts of burden.” Maybe Abraham had camels, and historians are wrong about the time camels arrived in the area; they are proven wrong every month, about similar issues. Sooner or later, scripture will be vindicated, and people will regret obsessing on the matter to their own detriment.

I’ve seen spirits. I’ve had many miraculous healings. Jesus visited me twice. The Bible is obviously true. When you know God personally, it makes no sense to pore over the Bible and look for flaws. If a guest were staying in your house, you wouldn’t go to the Internet and Google him relentlessly to find out whether he existed or not.

If you don’t know God personally, your problem isn’t the Bible. You need to get in touch with him and ask him to show himself to you. He does this all the time.

Remember; as important as the Bible is, it is no substitute for God himself. Abraham had no Bible, and he did just fine. Isaac, Jacob, Jacob’s sons, and Moses (writer of the Pentateuch) had no Bible. Enoch, Methuselah, and Noah had no Bible. When God proves himself to you, quit worrying about how many animals will fit in an ark. You’re making things harder than they have to be.

I don’t know if people should watch Romer’s series. If you aren’t grounded, it could sow doubt in your mind. Maybe I should quit watching. I enjoy it, and some of the material is valid and educational. I have asked God about it, and I don’t think there’s a problem, but I will not make a firm decision to keep watching. I make mistakes.

If you like Romer, remember: you’ll also like Robert Bakker. His impression of Romer is so good, if either of them dies, the other can continue his work.

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I got nostalgic, thinking about my brief time as a biology major, so I looked around to see if my old textbook was available. While I did that, I learned that Columbia University has stopped teaching vertebrate anatomy. They taught it in 2008, but the class listing is gone now.

Here’s something interesting: you can buy your own specimens for dissection online, and they’re cheap. For under a hundred bucks, you can have your own dogfish and dead cat, complete with dissection tools and lab guide. Now you know what happens to Fluffy and Snowball when you get tired of them. The companies that sell them fix them with formaldehyde and shoot their blood vessels full of red and blue rubber.

You can get a cleaned up cat skeleton for $125. Exciting. Educational and decorative.

When I was at Columbia, cutting up dead cats with a friend who went on to become a very unhappy radiologist, my friend told me biologists didn’t respect the kind of work Professor Bock and his students did. Biology had gone molecular and so on, so memorizing cat bones was not considered important. I have to wonder if that was a smart position to take, since doctors have to know how bodies are put together. I guess now students don’t see real bodies until they get their cadavers.

Good news for the guy who cleans the elevators in the East Campus dormitory. Still, it’s kind of sad to see da Vinci’s type of science disappear.