In the beginning, "god" put two lights in the sky. [View all]

One for day and one for night. That was a very, very early attempt at an explanation of why there is night and day. It's the best the storyteller in a tribe of itinerant shepherd and goatherds could come up with. "god did it." There are lights in the sky.

Jump ahead a few thousand years, and people are creating charts of the skies so they can predict the seasons of the year, etc. The "lights" in the sky move in a daily, annual and even millennial pattern that can be predicted, although the timing of that movement changes. That can be predicted, too, though, through keeping of detailed records.

For a very long time after that, it was thought that the sun and moon and other lights in the sky did the moving, with the Earth as the stationary center of that movement. It was complicated. Early stargazers kept more and more detailed records to make their predictions even more accurate. Complex diagrams were drawn to explain why things moved somewhat erratically.

Eventually, a few of those early astronomers and astrologers finally figured out that it wasn't really the sun and moon moving around the earth. It was much easier to explain if the earth was turning and circled around the sun. Then, the awkward diagrams could give way to a more sensible system. A system that even explained the weird apparent movements of the planets. About that time, the more or less spherical nature of our planet was understood, and things put more or less in their proper places.

We're even better at all that now, and have a very good understanding of the solar system and even of the nearby galaxy we're part of. We keep adding to our knowledge, through observation, mathematics, and other modern inventions.

And yet. And yet, there are still people who claim that everything in Genesis, the first book of the Bible is god's own truth. Every word of it is accurate and true. The simplistic explanations of a early tribal storyteller are still being told. Religion is like that. It holds onto everything and resists any other explanation. Now, almost all Christians understand the solar system and all that stuff, more or less, but the Bible story is still true, see. Imagine all of the other stories in that ancient scripture. Same story-tellers. Same time period, more or less. Same level of accuracy. We know better about the sun and moon now.

What are we missing with the rest? Why do we cling to those old fables, still? There's the question, really.