Of course not all Christian buy into the lie and it seems that generally the more flagrant the lie is, the fewer people hold to it. I really don’t know anyone personally that believes the dinosaurs were planted by scientists to corrupt the world so I feel pretty good about the people I know. I do know many who have believed other lies until I was able to show them proof of the truth.

The question I asked two weeks ago was “why do we believe these lies?” I got a lot of great answers and I believe there is truth to them all. Generally I would say we believe and spread lies because we don’t know any better. If I give my children an apple and tell them it is an orange their whole life then they will call and apple and orange. Of course it doesn’t make the apple into an orange and they will be mocked in school when they look at the flash card for “A” and loudly call it an orange, but it wouldn’t be their fault.

There is a reason why Paul says that people should not seek to be teachers and why Peter says we will be judged more harshly. It is our responsibility to find truth and to teach that truth. The problem is, straight up truth can be a hard sell, or at least that is what we think. Look at the news. They don’t just report the news they make it sensational because facts don’t bring in the dough. In pulpits around this country preachers are looking for the next great illustration, something to grab the congregation and fill them with awe. Monday morning the preacher reads about the not so scientific find I spoke about 2 weeks ago and it seems the prayers have been answered. No time to fact check just enough time to build a sermon around this nugget. The problem is, the nugget was only pyrite and not real gold.

I cannot blame the population at large for believing and spreading lies. We judge truth by the authority that spoke it. If you pastor says something is true then you are likely to believe him unless something of greater authority (in your mind) contradicts that truth. Some call this laziness, but in all honesty it is the human state. If a teacher proclaims a truth that you cannot verify on your own you will believe it even if it isn’t true.

This bring us back to the teachers, the authority that should bring truth. I fully lay the blame on them. In the case of the lie I spoke of before, it was printed in a Christian text book. This is not acceptable. It should not be preached or written by those tasked with keeping the truth. If we fail to fact check something and it turns out to be a lie then we are responsible.

Now I understand that there are times when a pastor or teacher might fact check only to find out later that the cited sources are bogus. This is the simple truth, if we mess up even through no fault of out own then we need to set it straight. That is the burden of authority and it cannot be shirked.

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Anyways, the point is that I was grading his work today and came across a part of the book that was teaching a “fact” not found in the Bible. I guess the idea was to help student believe what they read in the Bible, but the problem is the “fact” is actually a lie.

The book told the story of a NASA funded study done in Green Belt, MD where a computer program was constructed to predict the position of various celestial bodies for thousands of years “to prevent satellites from being damaged.” The program would work fine and then crash over and over. They checked the hardware and also reviewed the coding several times. They concluded that the software was crashing because it would come to a date error. Nothing they tried worked until one researcher remembered two times in the Bible when the rotation of the Earth was altered. Once the Earth stood still for about a day and another time the shadows moved back 10 degrees. The researcher calculated 23 hours and 40 minutes for the total time not accounted for and then plugged this into the computer program which began working correctly.

What an amazing story … only it isn’t even remotely true. I was told this story when I was about 11 at a Christian school I attended at the time. My dad was stationed in Guam at the time with the Air Force and the DOD school was rumored to be the worst school on island. I don’t know about that but I do know that when I was older and in public schools a lot of my science education felt very limited. Not just the whole origin debate but the actual teaching on how things worked. I was frustrated, but I remembered this story so I decided to look into it. At some point it started to feel like a sham.

I’m not sure if it was because I had started to distrust my education from the Christian school or if my ability to comprehend logic had grown enough to see through the multiple logical flaws, but I no longer believed that NASA had proven the Bible true via a complex computer program. I think this might have been my first experience with Snopes. I do know that I learned that this was yet another lie I was taught by Christian education.

Ok so here is the problem with this. First, there is no logical reason why the Earth standing still would cause a computer program predicting the movement of celestial bodies to fail. The movement of everything else wasn’t affected so that is the first failure. If everything else were changed, it wouldn’t affect out ability to predict based on what is happening now. The ancient Mayans, for example, have accurately predicted hundreds of years in celestial movements without a computer program or knowledge of the Biblical records in question. Now one might argue that their society had a record of this since it was a global event, but that culture didn’t exist at this point, they didn’t their predictions based on studying what the stars and planets were doing in their lifetime just like we can do now. People don’t even need to know why the planets move the way they do to make these predictions. Newton was the first to accurately explain this in modern Western history and even he ran into problems that were explained less than 100 years ago by Einstein. Regardless of that people were making predictions ignorant of the intricacies of gravity and relativity or the missing day.

My research also showed me many other failures like the fact that NASA isn’t interested in the position of various celestial bodies for more than a few dozen years with regards to their satellites. That’s at the extreme end of life for anything NASA has put in space. Also NASA flat out denies this or anything remotely related to it including working with the researchers in question.

So if this is a huge lie then why do Christians keep spreading this rumor? I’ll be writing on it more but I’d like some input. Why do you think Christians tell this lie over and over and even teach in it books still in print?

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