How Big?
PZ Myers recently posted some creationist drivel over at Pharyngula, which - unusually - focussed on physics rather than biology. This particular quote has been the subject of much scorn:
Unveils the fundamental truth, based on the scientific record of creation, that the earth accreted from a watery nebula; the great surging mass of water and chemicals had no particular shape and covered thousands of square miles of interstellar space.
Why is this so funny (apart from the idea that volume can be measured in square miles)? Well, personally I’m reminded by someone who, apparently at a loss for what else to say when Hemant at Friendly Atheist asked what we admire about christians, claimed that they “think big”. God is supposedly big. But apparently, the universe isn’t.
The author of the quote - one Parsons - is out by orders of magnitude when it comes to how much water you’d need to form the Earth. One commenter at Pharyngula claims that the earth has “approximately 196 MILLION square miles of surface area. It has, approximately, 26 BILLION cubic miles of material.” (I haven’t bothered to verify these claims, but I do know that they are closer to the truth than Parsons with his thousands of square miles.)
This isn’t the first time a creationist fails to comprehend large things. Recall for instance the Christian grad students who were supposed to teach middle schoolers that 10262 is such a large number that if you attempted to write it down, you would “fill up the entire known universe with paper before you could write that number”. Now, this could mean that whomever wrote that lives in a very very small universe … or they simply had no idea what they were talking about.
Is this symptomatic of something? Does the muddled thinking of creationists ultimately come from an inability to understand, or come to terms with, just how big the world is? Perhaps if these people actually comprehended the true scale of the universe, they would realise the hubris of believing that it was created for the sole purpose of housing bipedal, hairless primates.
I don’t know whether all creationists struggle with how big the universe is, but certainly some of the struggle with how even the Earth is. But yes, realising that the universe is that big and that old certainly puts me in my place when I think about it.
Comment by plonkee @ the religious atheist — Wednesday, January 2, 2008 @ 22:45
You may have a good point there, Felicia. I know it’s old-fashioned to compare the structure of the mind to a house, but sometimes it seems the creationist mind goes no further than their own yard.
It’s hard to believe there are actually flat-earth creationists out there. It seems to come down to their personal experience, and whether or not they have experienced a revelation, or travelled in some way to see the earth’s curve.
Being off by orders of magnitude seems (dare I say it?) to be an appalling blindness to education and research.
Comment by The Flying Trilobite — Friday, January 4, 2008 @ 02:53
hmmmm….i don’t know what they say about not being able to write 262 zeros,
but maybe that school got the exponent instead of the full number, at least according to a mathematics book by Roger Penrose i vaguely remember:
10 to the power of that number (actually i think it was something like 10¹³²),
i.e. 10-to-the-power-of(ten-to-the-power-of-132)
THEN one would need 10¹³² zeros, and that’s probably more than the sum of all particles in the universe.
Comment by Z — Friday, January 4, 2008 @ 10:29
Ok, now i think i’ve got the number i was referring to, right:
10^(10^123).
It’s only the denominator, and 1 is is the numerator (dividend):
1/(10^(10^123)) is, acc. to Penrose, the probability for the expanding universe not to collapse into a black hole before any life has been around.
A guest-writer has a new post about this on my blog (in swedish):
Comment by simple z — Tuesday, January 8, 2008 @ 09:40
Might as well be seen as proof of how awesome God is, since he can created something that big.
Comment by Markus — Tuesday, January 8, 2008 @ 22:10
Markus, Sure. But from whose perspective is it big? Only ours, because we happen to be so ridiculously small. Why would god have created a universe that vast just to house us, and then make us more or less incapable of comprehending its vastness?
In the end the size of the universe doesn’t prove anything. But that wasn’t the point of my blog post either, the point was that it seems to be a common trait among a certain kind of religious people to not quite understand that the world is much bigger than they think it is. This may or may not mean anything, I’m just musing, really.
Comment by Felicia Gilljam — Wednesday, January 9, 2008 @ 22:09