The Pareto
distribution of bible verse citations
If you’ve listened to many church sermons, you may have noticed that
they often cite verses from the church’s preferred translation of the
bible, or allude to verses indirectly. If you were to write down all
these verses, over time you’d build up quite the list. But you might
need a lot of sermons before you could reconstruct an entire
bible that way. That’s because many verses in the bible sound a bit
problematic to modern ears, and don’t feature in a lot of
sermons. Instead you might notice that your pastor is like a long-time
touring musical act, well past its hitmaking heyday, which keeps on
playing its hits. What people liked in the past, they can probably like
again. A cynical or perhaps realistic observer might note that the most
important skill for any church pastor is fundraising (“No bucks,
no Buck Rogers”), and some bible verses work better than other
verses for separating the marks I mean congregants
from their money. Among the more successful pastors – in terms of
attracting congregants and extracting money from them – we have Joel Osteen, whose
preaching style, or so I’ve read, leans heavily into “uplifting” and
away from “challenging.” Thus we wouldn’t expect to see successful
pastors like Osteen engaging seriously and frequently with bible
difficulties, as these seem to be bad for business.
If we were to extract the bible verses from a large corpus of
sermons, and plot their frequencies on a histogram, we might
find that the bible verse citations follow something like the Pareto
principle (or 80:20 rule, or the “law of the vital few”). That is,
we’d find many mentions of a small number of popular verses like John 3:16, and
fewer mentions of many less popular verses. If the bible verse citations
follow the 80:20 rule exactly, then we would find 20% of the verses in
the bible accounting for 80% of verse appearances in sermons. I have no
idea of what the real distribution is; it might be even more lopsided
than that.
Bible difficulties
As one might gather from the title of this blog, at Debunking
Christianity folks are distinctly interested in the bible verses that
are least popular with Christians. These are the verses that inform Isaac Asimov’s famous
quotation:
“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever
conceived.”
Asimov was a prolific writer or editor of over 500 books on a wide
range of topics, making him one of the more literate people to have ever
lived. Thus to read the bible in the same way that Asimov “properly”
read it would be difficult for most mortals. However, a very first step
toward reading the bible (or any book) “properly” would be to read the
whole thing from start to finish. And quite a few professing Christians
have not even done that, depending on which of the many online
survey articles you believe.
The unmoving Earth
Among the problematic verses being commonly ignored are those which
appear to support the geocentric
model. These verses include (citations from the ESV):
Psalm 104:5 “He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should
never be moved.”
Psalm 93:1 “The Lord reigns; he is robed in majesty; the Lord is
robed; he has put on strength as his belt. Yes, the world is
established; it shall never be moved.”
1 Chronicles 16:30 “Tremble before him, all the earth; yes, the
world is established; it shall never be moved.”
1 Samuel 2:8 “He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the
needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat
of honor. For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he
has set the world.”
The writers who wrote those verses, and most of the readers who read
them, right up until the 1600s, evidently took them to mean what they
clearly say: that the Earth is fixed in position, as a building resting
on pillars, and does not move. This accords with human intuition,
informed by our unaided human senses. Stand in an open field on a clear
night, and your senses assure you that the Earth you stand on is solid,
substantial, and unmoving, while those tiny lights in the sky clearly
move around you.
Ptolemy thought the solar system looked like this, image from Wikimedia
Commons
From our modern perspective, “we” now know that the Earth is moving
in a stunning variety of ways. Plate tectonics
continually creates new ocean floor at mid-ocean ridges, and recycles it
at subduction trenches, shoving continents around in the process,
raising mountain ranges (orogeny) and erupting
volcanoes, in a constant battle against the forces of erosion. Since erosion
works faster where there is more vertical relief, mountains are actually
among the most temporary of Earth’s features, contrary to the
prescientific view of mountains as being eternal. Mountains are
generally much more durable than individual humans, so you can have much
the same view of mountains as your great-grandparents did. But on a
geological time scale, mountains spring up and wear down faster than
most other parts of the land. Today’s Appalachians,
for example, top
out around 2000m, and are a far cry from the heights they may have
attained when young, perhaps similar to the modern-day Rockies and Alps.
Naturally, the bible is wrong about mountains as about so much else:
Psalm 125:1 “A Song of Ascents. Those who trust in the Lord are like
Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.”
In addition to Earth’s surface structure being constantly on the
move, the entire Earth itself rotates on its axis daily, and revolves
around the Sun yearly. The Earth wobbles on its axis, like a top,
causing subtle changes in insolation
that gave rise to cyclic glaciations in the
past. (Humans may be preventing the next glacial maximum by extracting
and burning so much fossil fuel.) The Sun pulls the Earth with it on its
very long revolution around the center of the Milky Way galaxy where a
supermassive black hole resides, sucking in entire stars and planetary
systems that stray too close. And the entire galaxy moves relative to
other galaxies, with a predicted
collision with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy in about 4.5 billion
years.
Heliocentric blasphemy!
As anyone with even faint knowledge of science history knows,
geocentrism gave way to heliocentrism
after Galileo
Galilei learned of the newly-invented telescope, designed and built
his own improved model, and pointed it at the night sky. Galileo
published his Sidereus
Nuncius in 1610, and it was a seminal document in the Scientific
Revolution. Galileo is considered by many to be the father of modern
science, in that he changed the way people approached the study of
Nature. By publishing his results in vernacular Italian as well as
scholarly Latin, and by disclosing his methods in detail and inviting
other people to replicate them, he set the model for the next 400+ years
of modern science.
Geocentrism didn’t give way easily, though. The Roman Catholic Church
via its infamous Inquisition
took vigorous (and often combustible)
exception to anyone who dared challenge Church teaching. Shortly before
Galileo took the dare, Giordano Bruno
was burned in 1600 for heresy. There is some debate among historians as
to whether and to what degree Bruno died as a martyr for science, but in
my wholly amateur opinion he gets the benefit of the doubt.
Galileo’s bold decision to risk his life for the truth triggered what
came to be known as the Galileo affair.
The Church resisted admitting error for a long time. After the trial of
Galileo, the Church placed books about heliocentrism on its banned list
(the Index
Librorum Prohibitorum), only removing the last one in the year
1835, roughly 200 years after geocentrism had been proven wrong. The
Church has since sent
mixed messages about Galileo, with Pope Benedict XVI among others
continuing to throw recent shade.
The bible is not a
science book, no really
You might wonder why, if the bible is not “meant” as a scientific
work (a common modern Christian apologetic argument to explain away the
scientific errors of the bible), it nevertheless contains verses clearly
meant to awe the hearer with razzle-dazzle about the wonders of Nature.
One possible explanation is that this is what worked in the ancient
world. Before the bible, there were similar works such as the Enūma
Eliš. After humans invented agriculture, they began growing in
numbers, building the first cities, accumulating wealth, and becoming
less equal. The humans who had more wealth needed a way to justify their
status to the humans who had less. Religion filled that need perfectly,
which is why all the early civilizations were theocratic, and why
ancient human leaders frequently claimed to be gods.
Some
books about religious razzle-dazzle and/or inequality
The
Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails edited by John W. Loftus |
Prometheus Books | 2010
Big Gods:
How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict by Ara
Norenzayan | Princeton University Press | 2013
Evolving
Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion
by E. Fuller Torrey | Columbia University Press | 2017
The
Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for
Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus
| Publisher: Harvard University Press | 2012
Why geocentrism still
matters
Even though the geocentrism/heliocentrism debate played out centuries
ago, it’s still relevant today.
Some people still believe it
For starters, some people still believe the Sun goes around the
Earth. From
Wikipedia (follow the link to see the links to citations):
According to a report released in 2014 by the National Science
Foundation, 26% of Americans surveyed believe that the Sun revolves
around the Earth. Morris Berman quotes a 2006 survey that show currently
some 20% of the U.S. population believe that the Sun goes around the
Earth (geocentricism) rather than the Earth goes around the Sun
(heliocentricism), while a further 9% claimed not to know. Polls
conducted by Gallup in the 1990s found that 16% of Germans, 18% of
Americans and 19% of Britons hold that the Sun revolves around the
Earth. A study conducted in 2005 by Jon D. Miller of Northwestern
University, an expert in the public understanding of science and
technology, found that about 20%, or one in five, of American adults
believe that the Sun orbits the Earth. According to 2011 VTSIOM poll,
32% of Russians believe that the Sun orbits the Earth.
If you are like me, you may find this hard to believe, even if you’ve
read books about the science of human intelligence differences which
document the diversity of cognitive capacities out there. But
geocentrism? I had thought that mistake was pretty much done and dusted,
but apparently it’s still alive and kicking.
Epistemic
ontogeny recapulates phylogeny, sort of, and epistemic fossils
In the biological sciences, Ernst Haeckel
famously promoted recapitulation
theory (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”), “claiming that an
individual organism’s biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and
summarises its species’ evolutionary development, or phylogeny.” While
this has fallen out of favor among biologists as a general principle,
something like it seems to hold when it comes to human beliefs. A child
begins life with a number of naive beliefs, perhaps including belief in
imaginary gods like Santa Claus, gradually replacing them with rational
beliefs through formal and informal education – or some beliefs, anyway.
We normally think in terms of “human knowledge” in the abstract, as the
collection of facts that “are known.” But human knowledge in this sense
exists nowhere; what really exists is each individual human’s unique
collection of particular truths and falsehoods. And different humans get
off the epistemic train before it reaches its current end of the line.
This makes some people the equivalent of epistemic fossils,
analogous to so-called living fossils in
biology, like the coelacanth. The
coelacanth was known only from fossil specimens for decades until
someone caught a live one in 1938.
Thus a “modern” person who continues to believe geocentrism, proven
false in the 1600s, is like an epistemic fossil today. You’d expect to
only find such misconceptions in a history book, not living and
breathing in front of you.
What use might this concept be, you wonder? It may be handy for
remedial education. I suggest identifying a person’s oldest incorrect
belief, because that should be the easiest one to correct. For example,
most educated people had abandoned a belief in the Flat Earth centuries
before modern science. Galileo was able to destroy geocentrism with
extremely primitive technology by modern standards, at the very dawn of
modern science. If someone believes in Noah’s global flood, that will
take a bit more to correct, because scientists didn’t manage that until
around the year 1800. And if someone believes in Young Earth
Creationism, correcting that will require science from the mid-1800s to
early-1900s (up to the modern
synthesis). If someone still believes that “refrigerator mothers”
cause schizophrenia, you’ll need science no older than some living
people. And if someone still believes that burning fossil fuels is
harmless, you’ll need science that is newer (and thus more complex and
harder to grasp) than the last time you used a rotary phone or
typewriter, if you’re old enough to remember those.
It’s a lot of work to spoon-feed a science education to someone who
doesn’t want it. Therefore I think the goal of persuasion should be to
get people to read books (in this case, science books), which can do the
bulk of the heavy cognitive lifting for you. Granted, that’s a huge
challenge, because people are generally ignorant of science because they
don’t like reading science books in the first place. But maybe you can
start them off with colorful science books from houses like DK
Publishing or Imagine which are written for “young readers.” Hey, don’t
laugh (or do laugh), I still enjoy reading them in my doddering dotage.
They’re a lot more enjoyable than the typical philosophy text with all
the excitement of a telephone directory meets insurance policy.
Religions
both appeal to tradition and hide from it
An elderly religion like Roman Catholicism likes to have it both
ways: it will appeal to its long lineage as if that somehow confers
authority, while at the same time fleeing from the unflattering bits of
its history (and they are legion). Catholics like to claim Peter as the
very first Pope, making them the Real McCoy when it comes to
Christianity, unlike those Protestant Johnny-come-latelies. But wrapping
oneself in the mantle of history isn’t great when the history is as
checkered as Church history. The business of burning heretics for
telling the truth about the Earth going round the Sun is not a great
look. In contrast, when corporations find that their brand has gotten
soiled, they re-brand to make the bad history go away. But not the
Catholic Church. It’s still the religion of Torquemada.
But aside from the checkered history, the colossal error of
geocentrism shows the unreliability of faith as an epistemic method
(i.e., a method for deciding what is true). Faith is essentially the
belief that believing something said by some authority makes it true. We
can test the reliability of that method by examining the record. And the
record is not good. Faith has taken some big swings, and had some big
misses, on rather important issues like geocentrism, Young Earth
Creationism, slavery, women’s rights, gay rights, etc. This calls into
question other religious claims that rely solely on faith, such as
ensoulment of the zygote, libertarian free will, dualism, and perhaps
all other claims that various religions disagree on (because they can’t
settle their differences with evidence).
Looking at the history of religion is like a hybrid outsider
test for faith. It’s an “inside” look at the “same” religion, but
from the “outside” perspective of what the religion has evolved into
after a few centuries of having some of its errors corrected by science
and social progress.
Science denial is far from
dead
Galileo was far from the last person to be persecuted for telling the
truth. Today we have giant industries of science denial. They don’t
usually burn people to death, but their tools are just as effective for
spreading anti-science beliefs. See Galileo: And the Science
Deniers in the list below.
More recommended books
Galileo: A
Very Short Introduction by Stillman Drake | OUP Oxford |
2001
Telescopes:
A Very Short Introduction by Geoffrey Cottrell | OUP Oxford |
2016
The
History of Astronomy: A Very Short Introduction by Michael
Hoskin | OUP Oxford | 2003
Galileo’s
Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science by Peter Atkins | Oxford
University Press | 2004
The
Day the Universe Changed: How Galileo’s Telescope Changed the
Truth by James Burke | Little, Brown | 1986, 2009
On
Trial For Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo
Affair by Maurice A. Finocchiaro | OUP Oxford | 2019
Galileo:
And the Science Deniers by Mario Livio | Simon & Schuster |
2020
Debunking Christianity
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