Brian LePort shared a brilliant comment someone left on the Reclaiming the Mind blog on a post about evolution. I thought I should share it, tweaking it slightly to improve the punctuation, and expanding it to show how it relates not only to the interests of scientists but also (perhaps even more so) to others such as young-earth creationists. Here it is:
God: “Now Mo, I want you to pass on the following information to the uneducated, polytheistic Hebrew slaves, OK? It will be relatively easy to convince them that I am the Lord their God, the only true God. The real challenge will be to get them to pass down precisely accurately what I am going to tell you now, since it won’t make any sense to them. Right, so, here we go: In the beginning, about six billion years ago, was an infinite singularity. In it was all the matter in the universe, see?”
Moses: “What’s a universe?”
God: “OK, right now Moses, I’m trying to work with you here. Even if you don’t understand, just write this down. Thousands of years from now some people called scientists will ask this question and it is important that the answer will have been written down by you in advance, OK? And there will also be folks called creationists who will say that the Scriptures you wrote must, if they are to be true in any sense, be absolutely accurate in every detail, including on matters of science…”
Moses: “What’s science?”
God: “I can’t go into that now. It’s too complicated. So where were we? Right, this infinite singularity exploded and…”
Moses: “What’s a singularity? And what does exploded mean?”
God: “Moses, son of Amram! Please listen! Please don’t interrupt and try not to ask endless questions, just write! OK?”
Moses: “Yeah, sorry. Errm, OK.”
God: “So this infinite singularity exploded, and withing a few billionths of a second, the groundwork for the laws of physics started to be laid down as all this matter expanded at a speed near that of light, see? As the matter cooled down, subatomic elementary particles started to form such as quarks and gauge bosons.”
Moses: “God?”
God: “Yesss, what is it now?”
Moses: “Is there a simpler version?”
God: “Sigh. Yes. In the beginning I created the heavens and the earth…”
I found the original story amusing, but also thought it made a good point about why what young-earth creationists and many others expect the early chapters of Genesis to contain is unrealistic. I hope you enjoy my own take on it.
Let me end with a joke even so, courtesy of Doug Chaplin:
A Higgs boson goes into a Catholic church. The priest says, “Sorry, no Higgs bosons are allowed in here.” The boson says: “But how will you have Mass without me?”
[rimshot]
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