February 14, 2007

Turn on Your Heartlight

Oh boy:

A science student in Kentucky says when the Bible records God spoke, and things were created, that's just what happened, and he can support that with scientific experiments.

"If God spoke everything into existence as the Genesis record proposes, then we should be able to scientifically prove that the construction of everything in the universe begins with a) the Holy Spirit (magnetic field); b) Light (an electric field); and c) that Light can be created by a sonic influence or sound," Samuel J. Hunt writes on his website.

Ah, yes, with the problems:

• God didn't speak everything into existence. Genesis 1:1 says:

  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

  Nothing there about speech or yodeling or chanting "mecca mecca hi mecca hiney ho." The talking bit doesn't come about until God decides it's kind of dark around those parts.

• Where, exactly, is the Holy Spirit described as a magnetic field? Do iron fillings line up in pretty patterns when it is near? Does it hold really awful but endearing kindergarten construction paper collages to the fridge door? If it encounters the anti-Christ spirit, are they attracted to one another with great force and get stuck together?

• Light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which would seem to make it akin to the *cough* Holy Spirit of magnetism. Why the arbitrary distinction, aside from making it sound all "sciency?"

• Light comes about from the use of sonics to collapse bubbles? Yep, that's what the science says... and has said for the last 60 years (thus, hardly new). Also, the light itself from such a collapse lasts no more than a few hundred picoseconds without strict laboratory conditions to repeatedly expand and collapse the bubble.

  Oh, and it seems some shrimp can do it too with their ferocious snapping claws (I kid you not - search for "shrimpoluminescence"). Maybe God is a shrimp, have mercy on us everyone.

Especially Samuel J. Hunt of Western Kentucky University, the student in question.