Your Soul, Free Will and Afterlife in Heaven or Hell: Part One

The soul, free will, and the afterlife consisting of Heaven or Hell are among the central tenets of the Christian religion, and because they are central to the human psyche, fall within the providence of anthropology, hence natural history. All have philosophical baggage attached. In two cases, the soul and the afterlife, that baggage is a rather excessive amount.

The Concept of a Soul: The trouble here is that ‘the soul’ has so many diverse definitions that it can mean just about anything you want it to mean. Probably no two people would describe the concept in the exact same way. However, I think we can agree that an egg cell has no soul – however you define it. A sperm cell has no soul – however you define it. Therefore, at conception, you have no soul. No cell has a soul, therefore no tissue (a group of common cells) has a soul, therefore no body organ has a soul (an organ being composed of various tissues), therefore you, as a collection of various organs and organ systems must have no soul!

So when did you get a soul (assuming there is such a thing and that it has some degree of tangibility)? Did you get your soul at birth? Perhaps it was on your first birthday? Perhaps you received you soul when you became of age, say 21. Perhaps it’s just as likely that you don’t receive a soul at all – there is no such separate and apart physical thing you get from any higher authority. Perhaps your soul just develops or evolves naturally as part and parcel of your growing maturity over the years, in which case it can’t be totally separate and apart from the body. In other words, if you develop a soul akin to your developing a sense of morality or spirituality, then it can not ‘leave’ the body after death. Translated, your soul (however you define it) isn’t your ticket to an afterlife. It resides somewhere in that brain-thingy of yours, locked somewhere within that maze of biochemistry that collectively makes up your grey matter. As an aside, if you were to clone yourself, would your clone have a soul?

The Concept of Free Will:  To start will let’s examine the paradox of free will. Here’s one of many contradictions. You insist that you have free will. Therefore, God has no control over your actions. Therefore, God is not an all-powerful being. A God who isn’t all-powerful isn’t the most perfect being that can be conceived of. God has to be the most perfect being anyone can imagine. Therefore, there is no God. Now if God is all-powerful, even though God has granted you free will, your free will is ultimately an illusion living on somewhat borrowed time in that God can revoke that free will gift at any time He choses and thus have His wicked way with you!

Another take is that if God exists, all His attributes must be compatible. If all God’s attributes are not compatible, God must not exist. For example, God can not have His own personal free will and be all-knowing. If God is all knowing, then God knows in advance what He will and will not do. If God knows in advance that He will not do something, then He has no free will of His own. He has no options available to Him but to not do what He knows he won’t do.

Anyway, God has apparently granted humanity, including you, a concept called ‘free will’. That is, you are free to pick and choose between various alternatives, including making choices or decisions that can be described as good, or as evil; moral or immoral; ethical or otherwise. However, regarding such a free will, I would argue that you can never be 100% sure that any choice or decision that you make wasn’t due to the universal laws, principles and relations part and parcel of physical causality that started operating from Day One (the Big Bang event) and thus forever and ever predetermined. You might be 99.999% sure you have free will, and that it was God given, but I can’t figure out any way you could absolutely prove it to any outsider, or to yourself for that matter if you are honest with yourself..

If you accept free will, then you must of necessity admit that causality does not always operate. Just as you, dear reader might refuse to believe in pre-determinism, I absolutely refuse to abandon 100% causality, an absolute cause-and-affect principle, which then forces me to reject free will, even though I do so reluctantly. It gives me no joy to think that what I’m doing right now is the ultimate outcome of the set of conditions that existed at the time of the Big Bang event and that I therefore have no choice since that’s the nature of a clockwork Universe, but it’s the lesser of two philosophical evils for me!

I assume that anytime you, dear reader, make a voluntary choice, that there must have been some causality chain of cause-and-effect happenings that led to that choice vis-a-vis some other choice. Your decision didn’t happen for lack of any reason at all. Put another way, your choice has a foundation. Now I just extend that foundation, that causality chain, back to the initial set of conditions present at the origin of the Universe in much the same way as you can trace your (extremely improbable) existence via the chain of existences of (extremely improbable) ancestors, going right back through the unbroken chain to the first proto-cell some four billions years ago, (a proto-cell which in turn may have come from the depths of space and has an ancestry (your ancestry) extending back untold billions of years before Planet Earth ever formed).  You certainly can’t deny that ancestral causality chain, so why deny a causality chain that ultimately extends back to the Big Bang event and the pre-determined chain of happenings and which leads you to whatever choices you are currently contemplating?

And so ‘yes’, using that logic, you aren’t responsible for your decisions and resulting actions (though I’ll bet legal eagles everywhere would have something to say about that, for that undercuts our entire legal system). But from the point of view of the Universe, it might ask, ‘so what?’ It matters not at all to the cosmos (and to 99.9999% of all life forms, including humanity – past, present and future) whether you deposit money in a bank, or rob that bank!

Just as we have computer simulations (such as ‘Life’, a computer software package) that allow for no free will, that is, everything is pre-determined given the initial set of programmed conditions, could we in turn be part of a simulated ‘Planet Earth’ computer ‘game’ or simulation of someone (something) somewhere out there? Do the characters in a typical video game have free will, or do they dance to the tune of their programmer and player? Can you, dear reader, prove to me (or anyone) by some chain of logic that you or we are not the product of or existing in a simulated and therefore no free will, computer generated, virtual universe?  If not, then you have to admit, however remote the odds, that that possibility exists.

If the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of reality is correct, free will is an academic or moot point since all choices or decisions are enabled. To explain the ‘many worlds’ concept, it boils down to the interpretation that whenever you (or anything else – animate or inanimate) are forced to choose, to make a decision, all possibilities are entered into. So, you have this free will decision to do X or to do Y or to do Z. You actually end up doing all three, and thus there’s a new universe Y, and a new universe Z, which splits and branches off from universe X because you choose via your free will (or so you think) to choice X. In reality, you also choose Y and Z. Therefore, no free will was ultimately exhibited.

However, if I were a betting man, I’d bet that humanity does have free will, although that in no way actually proves the existence of God. Ultimately however, does it make any real difference whether you, dear reader, have free will, or the illusion of free will, as long as you actually believe you’re your own boss? 

By the way, can you have free will in Heaven? I mean can you, of your own free will, commit a sin in Heaven? If you can, well you shouldn’t be in Heaven at all and God has stuffed up, being all-knowing, in letting you in, in the first place. If you can’t commit a sin in Heaven, then God has revoked your free will!

To be continued…

God’s Population and Environmental Policy: Genesis 1: 28

One part of the Bible that people like and take seriously is that God commands people to have sex – with the opposite sex of course, even if only for the purpose of producing more people who will grow up and eventually have sex, etc. Humans tend to be very good at this, regardless of race, IQ, occupation, status, income, overall health or even disabilities. Unfortunately, the consequences have been less than a utopian paradise or heavenly.

Most would agree that humans have had less than a perfect record when it comes to observing and keeping the Ten Commandments. But there is one other commandment that predates the Big Ten that humans have taken to heart and have had no trouble at all obeying. But instead of leading to positive results, this commandment has led humanity into turning our home, Planet Earth, into a cesspool of filth and suffering even death on a massive scale, not just for us but also for the innocents that had no say in the matter as well. The root cause is God’s population and environmental policies.

Though God’s population and environmental policy isn’t confined to just this one Biblical chapter and verse, that specific chapter and verse, Genesis 1: 28, is probably the most destructive statement in all of recorded history. Genesis 1: 28 is God’s population and environmental policy for mankind. It basically amounts to breed, like, well like rabbits! Further, there’s a subclause that suggests we speak loudly and carry a big stick and let Mother Nature know in no uncertain terms who is King of the Mountain. 

God's policy on population growth is flawed. God's not a Greenie or an environmentalist! We all know the passage from Genesis 1: 28 (King James Version) - It goes something like this: "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

In fact, it doesn’t seem to matter if you’re starving, are poverty stricken, have little if any access to basic amenities, the need to obey Genesis 1: 28 is so strong that little else matters. We’ve all seen horrendous images of the greatest of the great unwashed living in filth and poverty with children not much more than living skeletons, and dying like flies. Fast forward a generation and it is déjà vu all over again, only it’s now twice the number of the greatest of the great unwashed. Despite living in the most appalling of conditions, you can count on the universal – sex. And of course the poorer you are the more you will take dominion over resources in order to survive. A poverty-stricken man would gladly kill the last surviving member of an entire animal species if it brings in enough money to get him and his family through another single day.      

It’s normally Mother Nature’s way to keep population growth under checks and balances, except, thanks to God, humans prove the disastrous exception to the rule. When human populations suffer to the extent that death on a massive scale starts to transpire, other humans provide assistance to get them over the hump. Thus, the next time disaster strikes and people start dying off, you have a situation where they are even more in need of assistance since those who would have died the previous time lived instead to breed more - the next generation, now under the gun. Human compassion, or morality or ethics – presumably also a gift from God – always lauded, ultimately can lead to even greater need for compassion. It’s a vicious cycle.

Of course when it comes to non-human species, humans are not quite so compassionate, moral or ethical. It’s that “subdue” and “dominion” bit. Humans don’t wait for Mother Nature to take charge, rather assume responsibility themselves, as a logical extrapolation of Genesis 1: 28.  Here in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), the ACT government authorises yearly the culling (i.e. – shoot to kill) of multi-thousands of kangaroos because these animals allegedly have a detrimental effect on the native environment of the ACT (i.e. – they get in the way of humans). Never mind the fact that the animal is a native (not an invasive species) to the area and their presence predates human settlement by millions of years. Also, never mind that humans outnumber kangaroos by thousands to one. Even locally, humans vastly outnumber the kangaroo. Guess which of the two species has the higher impact on the natural environment. The example of the kangaroo can be retold in other contexts thousands of times over – the American buffalo for example. That's quite apart from humans killing animals for 'sport'; not for food or clothing, but just for a hell of it; because it makes the brave hunters feel big – king of the mountain in fact. Genesis 1: 28 strikes again, and again and again.  

Now Genesis 1: 28 is ultimately a Biblical impossibility because it is unsustainable, as should already be bleeding obvious to blind Freddy, and should have been obvious to God Himself. But God is selfish. God wants worshipers and the more the better. God may well want more and more and more humans to bow and scrape to Him, but at what ultimate cost to the Earth He allegedly created; all those plants and animals He allegedly created; and His ultimate alleged creation, humanity?

Apart from mice and rats (which have a low ecological footprint), there's probably no wild mammalian species still in existence that outnumbers us anymore. There's something seriously wrong when there's threatened and endangered species, some  that now only total 500 to maybe (if lucky) 5000 individuals left, when humans are seven billion strong and ever accelerating in numbers, especially in Africa. What hope is there for God's animal creations? We've living in an era of mass extinction right now, and we're the cause. What lifestyle for humans when there's no more fit air to breathe; no fit water to drink; all natural resources depleted; disease and hunger rampant.

God may enjoy all those billions of humans here and now with billions more to come worshiping and praying to Him, but those "fish of the sea" are a fraction of what once was; ditto the "fowl of the air" and ditto, ditto "every living thing" - well, maybe not cockroaches, not yet at least (until they become a human food source of last resort and you'd eat them if it were down to a choice of that or starvation - besides they're rich in protein). The Book of Revelation maybe impossible nonsense, though the ‘End of Days’ (for humans) might not be, thanks to Genesis 1:28. It would be rather ironic if God just barely spared mankind via Noah’s Ark, only to have mankind go kaput because of that other extract from Genesis.

Of all of God’s crimes against humanity, which have been numerous (like the Genesis Flood), this apparently innocent statement contained in Genesis 1: 28 in the long term will be the one with the most implications, and ultimately the worst one of all, and God made it, and an all-knowing God should have known better. Of course that’s if you place any credibility in Biblical quotations. But that’s another topic.

The Creation: God vs. Natural History: Part Two

Probably among the most familiar of familiar phrases in the English language is one that starts out “In the beginning God created…” However, there are alternative non-theological variations on that phrase that fall more in the realm of natural philosophy (or as we call it today, science). What’s at stake is the credibility of God’s alleged word vs. the credibility of the word of science. Christians might believe the Bible, but they put their real faith in science when they turn on their TV set or board an aircraft. So too should they put their money on the scientific (natural history) scenarios of the creations.

In the beginning God said a whole bunch of stuff central to His creation of life, the Universe and everything.*

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Botany is next up on the creation agenda. Of course you need land and water before you can have a garden (hydroponics and phytoplankton aside) so the ordering is, well, in order. Except God then makes a mistake. He starts off all things botanical with grass, which, truth be known, is a pretty complex and highly evolved plant. There were lots of simpler plants that pre-existed grasses. Even the dinosaurs existed before grass did! What God should have said is that “let the Earth bring forth algae and phytoplankton and mosses and ferns”. That would have been a detail which would have made botanical atheists stand up and take notice of Biblical bona-fides.

But, just when you think the Biblical creations gets things in a reasonable and logical order, here comes the next bit – the creation of the Sun, Moon and stars. The relevant quote, in case there’s any doubt:

Genesis 1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

Okay, the Moon and the stars aren’t all that relevant, but what did all those plants, those grasses, herbs and fruit trees, do for solar energy (photosynthesis) before the Sun got created? This is without question a major Biblical screw-up; the height of all that’s illogical in the scientific ordering of things, but then the Bible and science are not exactly bedfellows. Science on the other hand has the Sun and the Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago – plants came much later on and thus they never lacked for solar energy.

The screw-ups keep on keeping on. Next up we have the creation of marine life and avian life. Unfortunately for God, He screwed up by including whales among marine life. Okay, whales are marine creatures, but they are not fish. Whales are mammals. God apparently created whales before the end of the fifth day of creation. After the fifth day had ended, and the sixth day had begun, God then apparently created mammals, like cattle, and lots of other critters that in the fossil record preceded whales, as well as those things that “creepeth” upon the earth for example (I assume worms and snakes, etc.). What’s the relevant proof?

Genesis 1:21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

We note that whales were created before other beasts as outlined in Genesis 1:24. Yet, as any biologist will outline for you, whales evolved from land mammals and went back to a marine habitat. Whales are a relatively recent product of natural selection. They were hardly an animal that kicked off the mammalian branch of the tree of life, contrary to what God says. 

Take as a further example the creation of the male and female of the human species, which is I’m sure a bit more relevant and personal to all you readers. The barebones (as it were) were given in Genesis 1:26. Now, finally, God gives out the details!  

Genesis 2:7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Genesis 2:21 And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

Genesis 2:22 And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

Well at least now we get some sort of explanation – the male created from common dust; the female from the masculine rib. Details are still thin on the (dusty) ground, but the dust-and-rib theory is at least something that scientists can explore and play around with. Hands up all of you who attended high school biology class or university Biology 101 and got the dust-and-rib explanation? I thought so. Biologists have found a more convincing explanation. If you don’t need dust, and you don’t need ribs, then you don’t need God either in the equation. That aside…    

Now if you’re a male, are you overjoyed that your original alpha-male ancestor was made out of ordinary everyday garden-variety dust? Would you be happy if you had been made out of dust motes? If you’re a female, does it tickle your fancy that you’re (well your sex is) just a second generation afterthought (there is quite a break in Genesis between Adam’s creation and Eve’s coming to the party); a creation from a masculine rib? Does any of this strike you as slightly ridiculous? That’s all the more so since the creation of the original alpha-male and alpha-female afterthought was just a one-off. Post-dust and post-rib it was creation by that time-honoured mechanism – sex, which is smelly and messy and rather hit-or-miss. I mean hey, if dust and ribs work, well when you’re on a winner, stick to the original blueprint. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. God should have left the dust-and-rib instruction manual behind. So, if a modern loving couple wants a bouncing baby boy, well a bit of housework will round up the raw material. If it’s a little girl, well hubby can have a rib job at the local clinic. Okay, that’s ridiculous. But if it’s ridiculous now, it was equally ridiculous back then.

Now kindly note another creation screw-up here. We’re all familiar with the concept of day and night; morning and evening. Now the question is what celestial object is responsible for there being light and darkness, day and night, morning and evening? Did I hear you suggest that the Sun was the orb responsible? If so, go to the head of the class.

But it comes to pass that we have this verse:

Genesis 1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And then we have this verse (repeated from above):

Genesis 1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

So the upshot here is that day and night, morning and evening, existed prior to the creation of the Sun. Wow! Neat magician’s trick that!

Now kindly note yet another creation screw-up here.

Recall: Genesis 1:25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Recall: Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Now recall: Genesis 2:18 And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.

Now recall: Genesis 2:19 And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.

In Biblical parlance, this is the equivalent of the chicken and egg question. Which came first, man or beast? The Bible provides statements for both that’s can’t both be correct, so take your pick. Whichever you pick, the alternative then has to be nonsense. Odds are neither version is correct.

Now if God is perfect, there can be no Biblical screw-ups. If there are Biblical screw-ups, then either God isn’t perfect or the Bible is NOT God’s Holy Word. A reasonable explanation is that the Bible was written by non-perfect humans, and God doesn’t exist since the errors, the screw-ups, were never corrected by Him. God never proofread His own Holy Words!

One further anomaly that proves just about beyond any doubt that Genesis is the work of man and not of God; we note the endless repetition of “And God said.” My question – prior to Adam, just who was around back then to copy down anything that God said? And if the answer to that is nobody, then presumably God is just talking to Himself! Or, more likely as not, the entirety of Genesis, creation and all, is just an early example of what would later become known as science fiction.

*Kindly note that all Biblical references have been taken from the Book of Genesis that appear in the King James Version of the Bible.

The Creation: God vs. Natural History: Part One

Probably among the most familiar of familiar phrases in the English language is one that starts out “In the beginning God created…” However, there are alternative non-theological variations on that phrase that fall more in the realm of natural philosophy (or as we call it today, science). What’s at stake is the credibility of God’s alleged word vs. the credibility of the word of science. Christians might believe the Bible, but they put their real faith in science when they turn on their TV set or board an aircraft. So too should they put their money on the scientific (natural history) scenarios of the creations.

In the beginning God said a whole bunch of stuff central to His creation of life, the Universe and everything.*

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Genesis 1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. [God creates photons and electromagnetic energy.]

Genesis 1:6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. [This makes little sense, but it’s a division of heavenly ‘waters’ from the earthly ‘waters’. There’s earthly ‘waters’, and then there’s everything else above the earthly ‘waters’ – the firmament.]

Genesis 1:9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. [The distinction between land and sea is noted as the earthly ‘waters’ undergo a partial phase change.]

Genesis 1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. [Botany makes an appearance.]

Genesis 1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years. [The creation of the Sun, the Moon and the stars is noted.]

Genesis 1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. [God creates fish (including whales) and birds.]

Genesis 1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. [Add to that the invertebrates, mammals, reptiles and amphibians.]

Genesis 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

Genesis 2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

These are statements, but not explanations, far less adequate explanations. It’s akin to sleight of hand, the snap of the fingers, the waving of a magic wand. Its parlour tricks that dazzle but you’re left none the wiser. You’re awed by magicians’ tricks because you can’t figure out how they do them; and they’re not telling!

We note by the way that microbes, bacteria, viruses, unicellular critters, etc. don’t get a mention in Genesis. There’s no “And God said, let there be microbes”. That’s one major omission. Of course humans didn’t have microscopes back then and I guess God forgot to tell His scribes about the reality of the greater part of Earth’s biomass so that’s why they didn’t get a mention. All of God’s creations would fall apart at the atomic seams if it wasn’t for the strong nuclear force, so why didn’t God take credit for that? Okay, so the human author(s) of Genesis presumably didn’t know much about atomic physics, but they did know about gravity (the force that really dominates the Universe, including much of reality back on Terra Firma, including much of their reality. So why no “And God said, let there be gravity”? 

Those significant omissions aside, and they are significant, religion, as in the Bible, gives you various creation statements as we’ve seen. If the Bible gives you creation explanations of any kind, they are downright weird, if not supernatural, and certainly not verifiable explanations. Science tries to give you logical explanations for creation events and to the best of its ability, verifiable explanations.

So, God created the “heaven and the earth”. Heaven apparently is as in all things not earth – the rest of the cosmos. Out of what did God create heaven and earth? Out of nothing? Out of some pre-existing primordial matter that presumably God didn’t create but had available to Him as a raw resource? Or, alternatively, if He did create this primordial stuff, then He then took some time out to figure out what to do with it. Decisions, decisions! I mean if God is immortal; and the heaven (cosmos) and earth aren’t, then a lot of water passed under the bridge between God, and God’s creation of heaven and earth. In any event, where are the details? If I told you I had created a jumbo jet in my heavenly garden shed, you’d ask questions. You’d require the nitty-gritty details, as in made out of what, and what size – life-size or toy model – and can it fly. Was it carved or assembled from pre-existing parts or were the parts all created from scratch, and if so where did I get the raw materials from? 

Now even I have to admit, when it comes down to the creation of “heaven” (the Universe or cosmos presumably), scientists (cosmologists) come out with some pretty far-out-star-scout statements too. And some pretty far-out-star-scout details, but at least there are details. The nitty-gritty is that 13.7 billions years ago (science – vs. 4004 BCE God), there was a Big Bang which somehow created the Universe (matter, energy, time and space) from nothing, and to top off the silliness, that all happened in a space way, way, way smaller than a pinhead. Pull the other one fellows! However, at least they do have some observational evidence – runs on the board – to support at least the 13.7 billion year ago event (though little else), evidence which the 4004 BCE Biblical version lacks. For example, there’s the measured redshifts of the galaxies which suggest the cosmos is expanding. Reinforcing that there’s the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) – the temperature of the cosmos – which keeps getting cooler as the cosmos expands. CMBR measurement meets CMBR theory. Also an area when observation matches prediction is the cosmic ratio of hydrogen to helium. So, the Big Bang has runs (as in details and evidence) on the board. Genesis 1:1 doesn’t.

The “earth” part on the other hand has science on a far, far firmer ground. Astronomers have certainly witnessed the overall process by which extra-solar planetary systems are currently forming, and extrapolation then gives the process that created our Sun and planets, including the Earth, isn’t difficult. In brief, it goes something like this. Interstellar dust clouds rotate and contract due to gravity. Contraction down into a much relatively smaller volume makes for extreme heat and pressure. That heat and pressure eventually triggers nuclear fusion – a star is born. The surrounding debris under gravity contracts to much smaller bodies where the heat and pressure isn’t quite enough to trigger fusion. Those smaller bodies become the orbiting planets – like Earth. As I said, observations are made, explanations are given and details are, well, detailed. So when it comes to accounting for the creation of the Earth, it’s science on top by a mile, or two or ten.

As to the creation, or separation, of land and sea, well you certainly don’t need supernatural processes to account for that. Take a lump of mud or sand; add water; stir until everything is a uniform mixture or slurry. Let stand. What happens? The mud/sand sinks or settles to the bottom (gravity again) and you have separation of church and state – sorry, land and water. Science trumps God again. The Bible should have mentioned gravity and density, but it failed to do so. The Bible should have also mentioned the atmosphere when noting the separation of the land from the waters. Somehow God forgot to mention His role in separating out the atmosphere from the lithosphere and from the hydrosphere. That’s another major oversight IMHO. 

To be continued…

*Kindly note that all Biblical references have been taken from the Book of Genesis that appear in the King James Version of the Bible.