Mankind cannot change the temperature

I sat with my fellowship group from my church, trying to teach them that there was order to the Bible, which they had never noticed, in spite of the fact they were all in their sixties or older, had all been cradle Episcopalians, had been read a lesson a week their entire lives, and knew many many phrases from the Bible from having heard them again and again in Sunday services.

Came an allusion to the walls of Jericho.

"Those didn't really fall down," they insisted, "it was an earthquake that did it."

I have heard this claim before. "The Bible isn't a chronicle of miracles performed by God on behalf of a silly little tribe of nomad shepherds and warriors. The real miracle was in the timing of the events, like earthquakes, volcanoes [claimed as the cause of the Exodus miracles and the parting of the Red or Reed Sea], raising the dead [swooning profoundly], and so forth."

So, I asked them, you're saying God didn't act and shake those walls down? He made an earthquake happen?

They assented. God was sitting up on a cloud looking at human events and JUST as the Hebrews were marching around the city of Jericho, blowing their silly little trumpets, he chose to make an earthquake happen such that the walls, and just the walls, of the city fell down.

Apparently earthquakes are able to be selective in what they destroy.

Apparently, though, these charming and otherwise intelligent women were so used to the idea of an earthquake happening, and it not being miraculous, that they could accept such a thing without batting an eye.

I pondered this. I know a little about earthquakes. I believe these women did, too. Picture it: deep in the crust of the earth, a gigantic slab of rock is pushing against another gigantic slab of rock. Each of these slabs is being pressed by hundreds of miles of rock under pressure, pressed against the other slab. It's been pressing for millions of years at the very minimum, and every now and then it gives a little slip; sometimes it gives a huge slip and one slab jumps twenty feet to the side. Either way, the earth itself has been doing this pushing, and the energy released is gigantic. This is easy to understand, especially if you've never thought very deeply about it. This is as far as most people have thought, and it ends there. To be honest, I've only thought a tad beyond this myself.

But here it goes. The earth is moving the slabs or plates. Over the thousand years between massive earthquakes it builds up a nearly inconceivable amount of pressure. No, actually, it is quite inconceivable for the human mind, so gigantic is the energy that is stored in a fault line. Though it is measurable and can be described with numbers, our brains cannot conceive how huge it is, or as common parlance puts it, we "can't wrap our minds around it." I know it's inconceivable because these women couldn't conceive of it.

But note, this is why we like naturalistic explanations. We're used to them. We don't boggle at an earthquake, or at a fierce wind, or a flood. We've seen them all, they just happen, and they happen all the time.

But I had to ask these women, how much energy does it take to push five miles of rocky continental shelf to make an earthquake happen? And how much energy would it take to push down some man-made little structure like the walls surrounding Jericho? Which would be easier for a god to do? Why go for the unbelievably huge act of creating an earthquake and ignore the relatively puny little chore of knocking down some walls? Even big, thick walls (from the human perspective) like those surrounding Jericho.

I doubt I ever convinced those women of the enormousness of effort in a natural phenomenon. At a different time I tried to show them how much energy was in a wind. Just a normal, 10-mph wind. You feel the wind where you're standing in it and it's blowing your face. You see it moving the branches of a tree over here, and kicking up some dust over there. But do you realize how wide that wind is? You could drive hundreds of miles horizontally before you drove out of it. And you could rise a few thousand feet before you flew into another layer of weather that was doing something else. That's just one wind, just one phenomenon.

Could the US government create a wind? With all the machines we've ever invented and used, we couldn't make one wind, not one apparent event that even remotely imitated what sunshine routinely does every single day.

But our puny little imaginations cannot grasp that. All our clever inventions can't create it. But when an idiot like Al Gore steps up and starts screaming about human beings heating up the entire atmosphere--all 54,903,832,473,600,000,000 cubic feet of it, and that's just counting the ten thousand feet nearest the surface--most people have no clue about the magnitude of such a feat (that it's humanly impossible except in wild imaginations) and instead respond to their inner Chicken Little and become rescuers. Thus, the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) fantasy found a ready audience in a majority of Americans, partly because of peer pressure (from Earth in the Balance: there are many good people who should know better) but primarily because they were too poorly educated to challenge the notion and too reluctant to stand up to the many who were busy tarring all the doubters.