A few years ago, I wrote a training program for the school I work for. I wanted to train teachers on ways to get their students to discover new information for themselves and how to think critically. At the time, I was witnessing too many instances in which the teacher would ask a question, the student would give a wrong answer, and the teacher would immediately correct the student. I believe that when a person in a teaching position corrects the pupil, the pupil shuts off his brain. If the teacher is doing all the thinking, there is no point in the student thinking for himself. So my purpose in creating the training for the teachers was to get them thinking about ways in which they could engage the students’ own ability to think through a problem and correct the mistake themselves.
I came up with three basic ideas. This first I call the Back-to-the-Basics Method. Sometimes a student will give the wrong answer because of a misunderstanding of a fundamental fact. If this is the case, a re-teaching of the basic concept is sufficient to correct the misunderstanding. Before teaching can start, the teacher must determine why the student thinks the way he does by asking him questions. Often, those questions alone will fix the problem as the student works through the process. A joyful lightbulb flashes above his head, and he corrects his original answer before you’ve even pointed out that you were headed in that direction.
The second one is easily my favorite. I refer to it as Forward the Fallacy. Like the first, the teacher doesn’t point out that the students’ response is incorrect. Instead, he simply asks the student to take his answer to the next level. The teacher has the student use his incorrect answer as if it were correct and apply it to other concepts. Because his answer is incorrect, as he uses it to form new concepts, he will conclude that his answer was wrong, and he will formulate a new answer based on the new information.
The third is the Counterexample Method. When the student provides an incorrect answer, the teach presents a counterexample. (A counterexample is any fact that contradicts a statement.) For example, if the teacher asks a student for the characteristics of a prime number, and the student says, “All prime numbers are odd,” the teacher can provide a counterexample, such as 2, to prove the characteristic wrong. The student would learn something new and rethink his answer.
In every technique, the teacher accepts the child’s answer and asks him to check his premise. Since his conclusion is wrong, his premise must be wrong. When the student corrects his premise, he can make a correct conclusion. Most importantly, the student comes to the right conclusion mainly on his own with only small promptings from the teacher. Thus, the student makes new discoveries on his own and truly owns the knowledge. Instead of being a brainless drone who relies on the teacher, he is now full of self-worth, justly earned through his own skills and abilities.
Recently, I have combined the three methods under one name, which I call “And Then?” This name is based on a hilarious scene in the Movie Dude, Where’s My Car? in which Ashton Kutcher has a face-off with a drive-through operator who keeps asking him “and then?” as a means of getting him to order more food. Others have different names for the same method. Neil degrasse Tyson simply states “question everything.”
It’s interesting that people will apply critical thinking to subjects like math, science, and grammar, but they stop thinking this way when they deal with stories they’ve grown up with. One explanation for that behavior is that the stories were taught to them when they were a child, and the stories have become so ingrained in the subconscious that the idea of questioning that truth has never occurred to them (or terrifies them).
I would like to take one of those stories and apply the “And Then?” method to it to see how it stands up. The story I have chosen is “Noah’s Ark” from the Old Testament of The Bible. This is common enough that most people should know it.
Here’s brief summary just in case:
Noah was a righteous man living in a wicked world. One day, God tells him to build a giant ark and store two of every animal in it. (That’s the common belief, even though the story actually says that he gathered seven of every clean animal and only two of every unclean animal.) God will send a flood which would cover the entire earth, destroying everything He has ever created. Only Noah and his family would be saved. So Noah builds the ark. The animals come. The rains come down and floods come up (as the children’s song goes), and everything is destroyed except Noah, his family and the animals in the ark. Eventually the waters recede. The ark comes to rest on a mountain. God tells Noah that He will never destroy the world by flood again and seals the deal with a rainbow. The rainbow becomes a covenant with Noah that as long as there are rainbows, the earth is safe from destruction.
Here’s how “And Then?” works. Once you’ve heard the story, simply ask “and then?” In other words, if you assume temporarily that the story is true, what conclusions can you make? I think the first, and most obvious conclusion is, if the story of Noah’s Ark is true, then every civilization on the face of the earth was wiped out during the great flood. That’s definitely a solid conclusion. It is, after all, what The Bible says. If every civilization was wiped out, then surely archeologists have found remnants of these places that clearly indicate that a giant flood ended every civilization in the world at exactly the same time.
Now that we’ve forwarded the fallacy, let’s see if we can come up with any counterexamples that contradict our conclusion. If we find evidence that contradicts the story, then we can end our temporary assumption that the story is true and declare it false by means of contradiction.
A little research will provide us with all the information we need. First, we need to find out when the story supposedly took place. Thankfully, due to the time references found in The Bible, scholars agree that the flood would have occurred at around 2350 B.C. We know from any history class that there were many civilizations on the earth at that time. Let’s examine a few to see if any of them report a destructive even coming their way.
Mesopotamia—the land where the story supposedly told in The Bible takes place. In this land, two cities are flourishing: Ur and Uruk. A new city, Akkad has been developing nearby. The Akkadians conquer all of the cities around them, including Ur and Uruk. All this takes place between 2400 and 2300 B.C. There is never a mention of a flood getting in the way, and life continues. Not one of these civilizations cease to exist.
Egypt—I’ll comment here that I think it’s interesting that people can study the history found in The Bible and the history found in history books, yet they never attempt to merge the two. Egypt is a good example. Ancient Egypt is hugely popular. Even people who aren’t interested in studying history are interested in Ancient Egypt. The mummies, the pyramids, the pharaohs, the gods—everyone loves that stuff. All of this popular Egyptian culture took place in the 5th Dynasty, which ended with the pharaoh Unus, who ruled from 2356 to 2323 B.C. Nothing eventful took place under his rule. He built pyramids and married wives, and life went on, without any mention of a flood drowning everyone.
China—There’s not a detailed account of the events that took place in China in 2300 B.C., but historians have concluded that people were flourishing in what is now called the Neolithic Period from 12,000 B.C. to 200 B.C. A flood didn’t obliterate the people. They continued to grow and develop their civilization.
Indus River Valley—known today as the area of Pakistan and India. By 3000 B.C., two major cities had been built: Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Both cities contained 50,000 people. They were well-fortified, having been built with brick and stone. Like the pyramids of Egypt, the ruins of these once glorious cities remain. By 1700 B.C., these cities were vacant. But 2350 B.C. came and went without any flooding or destruction.
The great thing about counterexamples is that you only need one to prove something false. But from my experience, if you want to prove something false, there is always an abundance of facts to draw from. There wasn’t just one civilization on the planet at the time of the flood; there were several. I’ve only mentioned a few. I didn’t even get to the North and South American civilizations. All of these places existed before the flood, and they kept right on existing during and after the flood supposedly took place. This evidence alone is enough to conclude that the story of Noah’s Ark is false, but there is more evidence that we can examine.
Another “And then?” is the thinking through of the experience of having all those animals on this boat. How were the carnivores kept from the herbivores? During the time on the ark, what did the carnivores eat? What did the herbivores eat? Did Noah have more than two of every herbivore on the ark to satisfy the carnivores? Think of all the different animals and all their special diets. Some eat bugs. Some eat fruits or grains. Some eat other animals. The list goes on and on. Where did all this food come from? Was there enough space on the ark to hold all this food? What about when the animals got off the boat? If the whole earth was under water for the good part of a year, what was left to eat? There wouldn’t have even been any plants left. The herbivores would have died off from starvation if they were lucky enough not to get eaten first.
If we completely ignore the food issue, we can “And Then?” how the animals got back to their natural habitats. Did the penguins walk and swim all the way back to Antarctica? How did those land animals cross major oceans to get from continent to continent? Think about the sloth in South America or the black panther in the Florida everglades. What about the koala bear in Australia? How did spiders and bees and all manner of bugs find homes across the sea? Not even the largest birds are capable of flying across the oceans. It would seem to me that if the flood did happen, the animals would have been limited to the continents that touch each other until man was able to transport them on boats (which is how birds and spiders get from one continent to another today). Even if the animals did manage to migrate, why didn’t any of these animals stop and settle in places along the way? You would think that there would be little groups of animals along the routes to an animal’s final destination that we could use to trace the migration routes back to the place where the ark settled.
Another “And Then?” is the story of the survivors. According to the story, only eight people survived the flood: Noah, his wife, their three sons, and their wives. So if these were the only people on the earth, then these eight repopulated the entire earth. Of course, to believe such, we must disregard all of the other peoples in the civilizations already mentioned. But, even without the evidence provided by civilizations, could Noah’s family have created all of the wondrous variety of humans who are on the earth today in just a few thousand years?
We could even move on to geology and study the mountains and canyons and use what geologists know about them to show that their formation wasn’t altered by a flood. There aren’t any layers of sediment that you would expect to find after a flood. We could talk about the water supply on the earth. We could discuss what we know about what’s inside the earth.
The list of ways we could prove that the story of Noah’s Ark never happened goes on and on.
We could even talk about the mere size of the Ark. Thank heavens the description of the size is documented in The Bible. In fact, people have actually built what they consider to be replicas. What these people have never done is test their boats on the open seas, so we don’t have any evidence that their boats can float, let alone stay afloat on stormy waters. What we do know is that a boat a third of the size of Noah’s Ark was built in in 1909 by a shipping company. The Wyoming was 450 feet long. Wood was insufficient to keep the boat together, so 90 iron beams were installed within the interior to manage the sheer weight of the boat. Because of its size, as waves beat against it, the boat would flex in different areas, causing planks to twist and buckle. This allowed water to flow into the hold. The ship managed to stay afloat for several years with the assistance of pump. It sank in 1924 with the loss of all crew and cargo. A ship one-third the size of the ark, constructed with technology and experience 4,000 years advanced, could not function in water.
So we’ve proved the conclusion false. The story never happened. What now? We must go back to the beginning and check our premise. If the first conclusion was false, where did this story come from? Why was it so important that it became the starting point of a major world religion? Let’s go back to the beginning and think like the people did back then.
First off, can you imagine living in 2400 BC? You and your people don’t know a lot about science. Pretty much everything you observe is explained simply as “God did it.” The people who have managed to gain the title of “Speaker for God” (prophets) have told you that if something good happens, God is rewarding you. If something bad happens, God is punishing you. If he is punishing you, you must find out what you did and never do it again.
Now let’s talk geography. Every civilization at the time was developing near large rivers. The people did this because the soil surrounding the rivers is extremely fertile. The people could grow all of their crops to sustain the entire city in this dirt. Additionally, the people could use the river to send crops to other cities downriver. But settling near a river comes at a price. Rivers flood, and mostly every season. It’s the science behind why the ground is so fertile—the river floods and all of the sediments in the river settle on the ground as the river returns to normal size.
Now, visualize the devastation a flood that a river like the Nile, the Indus, or the Yangtze could produce? Anything in the water’s path would be destroyed. People caught unprepared would lose everything, often including their own lives. And, to top it off, you believe that your god did it to punish you for your wickedness. You literally live in fear every day of your life that a flood could destroy your very way of life. Until one day a story emerges in which a sign is given in which God promises not to destroy the people by flood as long as they can see rainbows. Now, a father can tell his son, “See that rainbow, boy? We can rest assured that God won’t kill us by flood today!” And everyone goes to bed at peace with the idea that they are not going to die a horrible death that night. Later, some ambitious fellow writes the story of the Great Rainbow Promise down and travels from town to town, passing it on.
So what is this story about the rainbow? You might have been too hasty if your first thought was Noah’s Ark. The actual story being passed from people to people at the time is called The Epic of Gilgamesh. Scholars agree that this story was first written down at around 2100 BC, predating the Book of Genesis (the book in The Bible that contains the story of Noah and the Ark) by at least 1,000 years, making Noah and the Ark one of the first ever cases of plagiarism. (Even though the events described in the story can be traced back to 2300 BC, Bible scholars agree that the five books of Moses weren’t written until 600 BC.)
Defenders of Noah claim that because the epic flood was a world-wide catastrophe that surely more than one person wrote the story down. This idea clearly and neatly explains how two identical stories came into existence. But, remember that we have already proved that no global flood existed. If there was no flood, there was no event to document. Even so, if we assume temporarily (again) that the flood did happen, and only eight people walked off the boat, then you’re telling me that eight people didn’t make sure that all copies of the documentation had the same names for places and people?
I tend to follow Occam’s razor, which states that among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. In other words, the simplest explanation is usually correct. And in this case, the competing hypotheses do not predict equally well. It was been proven from many different angles that no flood ever happened. The suggestion that one did happen is a false premise. Because it is false, it can’t be a competing hypothesis. The only idea that remains is that the story from The Bible was copied from an older story used to reassure people that they weren’t going to die.
I know this was a long blog to read. And if you’ve stuck with me this far, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I wanted to take you through the process of how asking “and then?” at the end of any conclusion can help a person determine if the conclusion is true or false. In this case, we used a story that many people around the world actually consider to be true. What I want to stress in closing is the importance of questioning everything. Stories cannot—and should not—be taken at face value. They must be criticized. If they are true, they will withstand the scrutiny of the critics. If they are false, they will topple under their own foundation.
Ethan's Journal 