Episode 5-Science and the Bible – Can the Bible be Trusted (Part 4)
What is Scientism?
Scientism is the view that science and the scientific method are the best or only objective means by which people should determine normative and epistemological values
The improper usage of science or scientific claims. This usage applies equally in contexts where science might not apply, such as when the topic is perceived as beyond the scope of scientific inquiry, and in contexts where there is insufficient empirical evidence to justify a scientific conclusion.
"The belief that the methods of natural science, or the categories and things recognized in natural science, form the only proper elements in any philosophical or other inquiry", or that "science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective" with a concomitant "elimination of the psychological [and spiritual] dimensions of experience".
Impact of Scientism on Christianity
Christian practice is diminishing in the west largely due to the impact of scientism. The conflict between the two disciplines has got to the stage where popular science writers such as Richard Dawkins are claiming that science can and should replace religion.
Their arguments are grounded in two things:
Criticism of what they perceive as the irrationality of religion and the rationality and practical achievements of science.
An errant understanding of what the Bible does and doesn’t say and the styles of literature involved
Public discourse is increasingly influenced by scientism as rational and objective as opposed to religion as irrational and subjective.
Religious intolerance operates both within and between religious groups. Often religious dogmas are used as weapons to attack and marginalize those considered to be non-conformist.
The scientism mindset defines the Gospel stories and all other religions as forms of mythology. As a result, the theological disagreements that caused church schisms or conflicts between theistic world views are reduced to meaninglessness.
Evolutionary biologists have explained how religion and politics evolved in tandem with one another to support male patriarchal power structures and how religion has been used as a force for social control. This is no doubt true in some cases and it’s not uncommon in Christianity for people to seek justification for their positions in the biblical text. This doesn’t mean that the text supports their position, only that they seek support there and justify their actions from it.
Making a distinction between religion as a phenomenon and the defining characteristics of individual religions while they are under the control of their founders is valuable.
Christianity was unique while led by Jesus, who taught justice for all.
Regarding the relationship between religion and violence, Jesus, who clearly had the potential to be the political messiah whom the Jews were expecting would take up arms and liberate them from the Roman Empire, refused to do so. As a result, he left himself vulnerable to execution by an unholy alliance of church and state.
Regarding religious dogmas and norms used as weapons to attack and marginalize those considered “other” within religious communities, the ministry of Jesus was also notable for challenging religion.
Jesus himself refused to conform to the many petty and overly burdensome rules of the religious establishment taking huge social risks in championing women and those considered sinners and outsiders
For Jesus, the worst kind of religious leaders are those who prioritize legalism over love. The early church community was highly reflective of the teachings of its founder. The authoritarian control tendencies began to emerge however when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire.
The idea of “one church” that was a hallmark of the first century church is one that doesn’t “other” anyone and is a picture of diverse populations coming together in unity.
This is illustrated by Paul’s use of the metaphor of a body and its members to emphasize how his church community is composed of individuals from various backgrounds and with diverse gifts.
Their unity and harmony is achieved in their confession of Jesus Christ as the Lord and as their savior. The Modern church and the church since the first century has relied on authority to gain conformity.
As Jesus himself said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.” The unity of his church should be a unity of love, not a unity of dogma. Another of Jesus’s most celebrated statements is “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
Science is the only way to prove anything. Is this true?
First we need to understand the scientific method. Wikipedia - The scientific method is an empirical method of acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century (with notable practitioners in previous centuries). It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation. It involves formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on such observations; experimental and measurement-based testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings. These are principles of the scientific method, as distinguished from a definitive series of steps applicable to all scientific enterprises.
The scientific method is a myth and often when people cite science, they are citing fields of research and study, but not fields of science.
There are a lot of things that are not subject to this method of determining truth
Cultural Anthropology
All fields of paleontology, paleobotany etc.
Theoretical Physics
Astronomy and Astrophysics
History – The killing of Kennedy, WW2, what you had for breakfast
Philosophy
Psychology
How do you feel about a given topic or situation.
Why do you feel that way
Do I love my wife?
Age of the Earth and creation timeline
How were there 4 days passing if God created the sun on the 4th day?
Most modern Christians don’t take this as a 24 hour period. If it were a 24 hour period, how would that happen without sun that the earth revolved against
Are mankind and the earth only 6000 years old?
The Bible never makes this claim
Was the Exodus a Myth?
What about the animal kingdom?
Are bats birds?
The bible is not a science textbook and to a primitive people these were the same idea. A flying animal.
French Botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708) is considered the founder of the modern concept of Genus and Species and bionomial nomenclature.
It was popularized in 1753 when Linnaeus published his Species Plantarum.
I hardly think it’s a indictment of scripture that God spoke to these people in terms they could understand
Were stripes on animals from looking at a tree?
Jacob took branches from white poplar trees, freshly cut almond trees, and some other trees, stripped off their bark to make white streaks, and uncovered the white part inside the branches. Then he placed the branches that he had stripped bare in all the watering troughs where the flocks came to drink. He placed the branches in front of the flock, and they went into heat as they came to drink. When the flocks mated in front of the branches, they would bear offspring that were striped, speckled, or spotted. Jacob kept the lambs separate, facing the striped and entirely black ones that belonged to Laban's flock. He set his own herd by itself and would not let them be with Laban's flock. Whenever the more vigorous of the flock came into heat, Jacob would place the branches in the troughs in front of the flock to make them mate by the branches. But he didn't put the branches in front of any of the feeble members of the flock. As a result, the feeble ones belonged to Laban, but the stronger ones belonged to Jacob.(Genesis 30:37-42)
At first reading, it's peculiar to see a herdsman use visual aids at the moment of conception to affect the progeny of animals, with the intention of producing a particular breeding effect. The coloring is determined by what the parents see during intercourse. However, further details in this passage showcase a complete compatibility with modern epigenetics. The flock tended by Jacob had only monochrome animals with respect to phenotype. However, in regards to genotype, 33% were pure monochromes (homozygotes), and 66% were heterozygotes (containing the gene of spottedness). By crossing the heterozygotes among themselves, Jacob would produce 25% spotted sheep.
Thus, a fascinating 2008 paper by Joshua Backon (from the Department of Pharmaceutics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) was published examining this in light of recent advances in epigenetics. In this paper, Backon showcases how prenatal nutrition can affect the agouti gene that regulates fur color in both sheep and mice. The fungi that resides in the bark of these specific types of branches of poplar and almond provide the chemicals that comprise the exact amino acids to create alterations in the color of fur without having any direct effect on the DNA.
https://www.sentinelapologetics.org/single-post/2018/01/21/Jacobs-Sheep-Breeding-and-Epigenetics
Does God protect from the Sun?
Psalm 121- I will lift up my eyes to the hills— From whence comes my help? 2 My help comes from the Lord, Who made heaven and earth. 3 He will not allow your foot to [a]be moved; He who keeps you will not slumber. 4 Behold, He who keeps Israel Shall neither slumber nor sleep. 5 The Lord is your [b]keeper; The Lord is your shade at your right hand. 6 The sun shall not strike you by day, Nor the moon by night. 7 The Lord shall [c]preserve you from all evil; He shall preserve your soul. 8 The Lord shall preserve[d] your going out and your coming in From this time forth, and even forevermore.
Evolution
Let me quote famous evolutionists
The evolutionary events that led to the origin of the Homo lineage are an enduring puzzle in paleoanthropology, chiefly because the fossil record from between 3 million and 2 million years ago is frustratingly sparse, especially in eastern Africa. (Kimbel, W. H. 2013. Palaeoanthropology: Hesitation on hominin history. Nature. 497 (7451): 573-574.)
But with so little evidence to go on, the origin of our genus has remained as mysterious as ever. (Wong, K. 2012. First of Our Kind: Could Australopithecus sediba Be Our Long Lost Ancestor? Scientific American. 306 (4): 30-39.)
The origin of our own genus remains frustratingly unclear. (Wood, B. 2011. Did early Homo migrate “out of” or “in to” Africa? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 108 (26): 10375-10376.)
But doesn’t DNA prove similarity? -https://www.icr.org/article/dna-science-disproves-human-evolution
Although paleontological evidence has been lacking, in more recent times evidence supporting human evolution was thought to have been found in the DNA of living apes and humans.
DNA is a double-stranded molecule that under certain conditions can be denatured—i.e., “unzipped” to make it single-stranded—and then allowed to zip back up. During the initial stages of DNA science in the early 1970s, very crude and indirect techniques were utilized to unzip mixtures of human and chimpanzee DNA, which were then monitored to see how fast they would zip back up compared to unmixed samples.
Based on these studies, it was declared that human and chimpanzee DNA was 98.5% similar. But only the most similar protein-coding regions of the genome (called single-copy DNA) were compared, which is an extremely small portion—less than 3%—of the total genome. Also, it was later discovered by an evolutionary colleague that the authors of these studies had manipulated the data to make the chimpanzee DNA appear more similar to human than it really was.
These initial studies not only established a fraudulent gold standard of 98.5% DNA similarity between humans and chimps but also the shady practice of cherry-picking only the most similar data. The idea of nearly identical human-chimp DNA similarity was born and used to bolster the myth of human evolution, something that the lack of fossil evidence was unable to accomplish.
As DNA sequencing became more advanced, scientists were able to compare the actual order of DNA bases (nucleotides) between DNA sequences from different creatures. This was done in a process in which similar DNA segments could be directly matched up or aligned. The differences were then calculated.
Little progress was made in comparing large regions of DNA between chimpanzees and humans until the genomics revolution in the 21st century with its emphasis on developing new technologies to sequence the human genome. Between 2002 and 2005, a variety of reports was published that on the surface seemed to support the 98.5% DNA similarity myth.
However, the researchers were only including data on the most highly aligning sequences and omitting gaps and regions that did not align. Once again, we had the same old problem of cherry-picking the data that support evolution while ignoring everything else. However, at least three of these papers described the amount of non-similar data that was thrown out. When those missing data were included in the original numbers, an overall DNA similarity between humans and chimpanzees was only about 81 to 87%, depending on the paper!
Determining DNA similarity between humans and chimpanzees isn’t a trivial task. One of the main problems is that the current chimpanzee genome wasn’t constructed based on its own merits. When DNA is sequenced, it’s produced in millions of small pieces that must be “stitched” together with powerful computers.
In large mammalian genomes like the chimpanzee, this isn’t easy, especially since very few genetic resources exist to aid the effort compared to those available for the human genome project. (launched in 1990 and just completed in March 2022 – 32 years later) Because of this resource issue, a limited budget, and a healthy dose of evolutionary bias, the chimpanzee genome was put together using the human genome as a guide or scaffold onto which the little DNA sequence snippets were organized and stitched together. Therefore, the current chimpanzee genome appears much more human-like than it really is. In fact, a recent study by Tomkins showed that individual raw chimpanzee DNA sequences that had poor similarity to human sequences aligned very poorly (if at all) onto the chimpanzee genome that had been assembled using the human genome as a framework. This is a dramatic illustration that it is not an authentic representation of the actual chimpanzee genome.
Another serious problem with the chimpanzee genome is that it appears to contain significant levels of human DNA contamination. When DNA samples are prepared in the laboratory for sequencing, it’s common to have DNA from human lab workers get into the samples. Several studies show that many non-primate DNA sequence databases contain significant levels of human DNA.
A recent study shows that a little over half of the data sets used to construct the chimpanzee genome contain significantly higher levels of human DNA than the others. These data sets with apparent high levels of human DNA contamination were the ones utilized during the first phase of the project that led to the famous 2005 chimpanzee genome publication. The data sets produced after this were added on top of the ones in the initial assembly. So, not only was the chimpanzee genome assembled using the human genome as a scaffold, but research indicates that it was constructed with significant levels of contaminating human DNA. This would explain why raw unassembled chimpanzee DNA sequences are difficult to align onto the chimpanzee genome with high accuracy; it’s because it’s considerably more human-like than it should be.
So, how similar is chimpanzee DNA to human? Tomkins research indicates that raw chimpanzee DNA sequences from data sets with significantly lower levels of human DNA contamination are on average about 85% identical in their DNA sequence when aligned onto the human genome. Therefore, based on the most recent, unbiased, and comprehensive research, chimpanzee DNA is no more than 85% similar to human.
What Does 85% DNA Similarity Mean?
So, what does 85% DNA similarity really mean? First of all, it’s important to note that for human evolution to seem plausible, a DNA similarity of 99% is required. This is based on known current mutation rates in humans and an alleged splitting of humans from a common ancestor with chimpanzees about three to six million years ago. This length of time is a mere second on the evolutionary timescale. Any level of similarity much less than 99% is evolutionarily impossible. This is why evolutionists rely on all sorts of monkey business when it comes to comparing human and chimpanzee DNA—they must achieve a figure close to 99% or their model collapses.
So, what if humans and chimpanzees are only about 85% similar in their DNA? Isn’t this pretty close, too, even if it puts evolution out of the picture? In reality, this level of similarity is exactly what one would expect from a creation perspective because of certain basic similarities in overall body plans and cellular physiology between humans and chimpanzees. After all, DNA is not called the genetic code for nothing. Just as different software programs on a computer have similar sections of code because they perform similar functions, the same similarity exists between different creatures in certain sections of their genomes. This is not evidence that one evolved from another but rather that both creatures were engineered along similar basic principles. DNA similarities between different creatures are evidence of common engineered design, and the fact that the differences in these DNA sequences are unexplainable by alleged evolutionary processes is also strong evidence of design.
The Bible says that every living thing was created according to its kind. This fits the clear, observable boundaries we see in nature between types of creatures, as well as the distinct boundaries researchers find in genomes as DNA sequencing science progresses.
In regard to humans, we are not only a distinctly different kind compared to chimpanzees and other apes, but we are also the one part of creation that stands out above all other living forms because the Bible states, “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27).
Not only is evolution a false paradigm lacking scientific support, it also directly attacks one of the key paradigms of the Bible. Humanity’s unique creation in God’s image is foundational to why Jesus Christ came to redeem us. Man became corrupt through sin from his original created state—he did not evolve from an ape.
References
Menton, D. 2016. Did Humans Really Evolve from Ape-like Creatures? In Searching for Adam: Genesis & the Truth About Man’s Origins. T. Mortenson, ed. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 229-262.
Kimbel, W. H. 2013. Palaeoanthropology: Hesitation on hominin history. Nature. 497 (7451): 573-574.
Wong, K. 2012. First of Our Kind: Could Australopithecus sediba Be Our Long Lost Ancestor? Scientific American. 306 (4): 30-39.
Wood, B. 2011. Did early Homo migrate “out of” or “in to” Africa? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 108 (26): 10375-10376.
Tomkins, J. and J. Bergman. 2012. Genomic monkey business—estimates of nearly identical human-chimp DNA similarity re-evaluated using omitted data. Journal of Creation. 26 (1): 94-100.
Marks, J. 2011. The Rise and Fall of DNA Hybridization, ca. 1980-1995, or How I Got Interested in Science Studies. In Workshop on “Mechanisms of Fraud in Biomedical Research,” organized by Christine Hauskeller and Helga Satzinger. The Wellcome Trust, London, October 17-18, 2008.
Tomkins, J. P. 2011. How Genomes are Sequenced and Why it Matters: Implications for Studies in Comparative Genomics of Humans and Chimpanzees. Answers Research Journal. 4: 81-88.
Tomkins, J. 2016. Analysis of 101 Chimpanzee Trace Read Data Sets: Assessment of Their Overall Similarity to Human and Possible Contamination with Human DNA. Answers Research Journal. 9: 294-298.
Longo, M. S., M. J. O’Neill, and R. J. O’Neill. 2011. Abundant Human DNA Contamination Identified in Non-Primate Genome Databases. PLoS One. 6 (2): e16410.
Kryukov, K. and T. Imanishi. 2016. Human Contamination in Public Genome Assemblies. PLoS One. 11 (9): e0162424.
The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium. 2005. Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome. Nature. 437 (7055): 69-87.
* Dr. Tomkins is Director of Life Sciences at the Institute for Creation Research and earned his Ph.D. in genetics from Clemson University, where he worked as a research technician in a plant breeding/genetics program. After receiving his Ph.D., he worked at a genomics institute and became a faculty member in the Department of Genetics and Biochemistry at Clemson.
Cite this article: Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. 2017. DNA Science Disproves Human Evolution. Acts & Facts. 46 (6).
Scientific Proofs in the Bible
The earth’s free float in space.
Fifteen hundred years before Christ, many people believed that the earth sat on a large animal or giant. However, before science discovered the truth in 1650, the Bible already spoke of the earth free floating in space.
“He stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth upon nothing.” (Job 26:7)
Washing your hands
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica a young doctor in 1845 discovered the importance of washing. Hundreds of years ago, a major problem was thatthe death rate among women giving birth in hospitals was high. In some years the death rate was 30% of women after giving birth. In centuries past, doctors never practiced washing their hands before going to the next patient. This was because the presence of microscopic diseases wasn’t yet discovered. When it was discovered that washing hands would help stop the spread of disease the death rate of pregnant women dropped down to 2%.
However, the Bible clearly taught people how to deal with diseases earlier than when science discovered washing with water.
“Now when the man with the discharge becomes cleansed from his discharge, then he shall count off for himself seven days for his cleansing; he shall then wash his clothes and bathe his body in running water and will become clean.” (Leviticus 15:13)
The Circle of the earth
It was the Greek Philosophers who first concluded the earth was round. Eratosthenes, Aristotle, and Pythagoras all wrote about this theory as early as 500 BC. However, many years earlier, the Bible has already revealed about this truth. Because the book of Isaiah was written between 740 and 680 BC.
“It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.” (Isaiah 40:22)
The Bible and Oceanography
Over 200 years ago, Matthew Maury, the father of oceanography, noticed the Bible verse Psalm 8:8 describing the paths of the seas. And so he vowed to find those paths that God said in His Word. He then discovered the warm and cold continental currents. His book on oceanography is still used in universities.
“The birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, Whatever passes through the paths of the seas.” (Psalm 8:8)
The First Law of Thermodynamics
Nothing is evolving and everything is finished just as the Bible says.
“Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished.” (Genesis 2:1)
The Bible and Quarantine
Before medical science found out about the importance of isolating a person with infectious disease, God taught His people about this in the Bible. In the 14th century, 70 million lives were taken through plague because they failed to separate the sick from the healthy. It was until the 17th century that the laws of quarantine were instigated. But well before modern medicine, God instructed his people to do this with their sick.
“As long as he has the infection, he remains unclean. He must live alone in a place outside the camp.” (Leviticus 13:46)
The Bible and dinosaurs.
God, Himself spoke to Job of a creature He created called “Behemoth”. Some commentators say it was a hippopotamus, however, the hippo doesn’t fit in some accounts. The characteristic of this massive animal that God created had a tail like that of a cedar tree which is a very large tree. And the hippo clearly doesn’t fit that description. Job 40:15-24 in the Bible says:
“Look at Behemoth, which I made along with you and which feeds on grass like an ox. What strength it has in its loins, what power in the muscles of its belly! Its tail sways like a cedar; the sinews of its thighs are close-knit. Its bones are tubes of bronze, its limbs like rods of iron. It ranks first among the works of God, yet its Maker can approach it with his sword. The hills bring it their produce, and all the wild animals play nearby. Under the lotus plants it lies, hidden among the reeds in the marsh. The lotuses conceal it in their shadow; the poplars by the stream surround it. A raging river does not alarm it; it is secure, though the Jordan should surge against its mouth. Can anyone capture it by the eyes, or trap it and pierce its nose?”
The planet's core is hot
"The earth, from which food comes, is transformed below as by fire." Job 28:5
Water changes state
The water cycle, also known as the hydrologic cycle, is a well-known phenomenon. It turns out the Bible mentions it more than once.
Ecclesiastes 1:7 says: "All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again."
Amos 9:6 also mentions it in one part: "He calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out over the face of the land." And so does Job 36:27-28: "He draws up the drops of water, which distill as rain to the streams; the clouds pour down their moisture and abundant showers fall on mankind."
Another example can be found in Psalm 135:7, which reads: "He makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth; he sends lightning with the rain and brings out the wind from his storehouses."
Noah’s Flood
Timeline concerns relative to Egyptian Pyramids and The Great Wall of China, etc.
Did all the animals fit on Noah’s ark?
From Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/evidence-for-a-flood-102813115/
Two geologists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have offered a new theory of what happened next. William Ryan and Walter Pitman, in Noah's Flood (Simon & Schuster), postulate that as time went on, the world warmed, the glaciers retreated and meltwater from the European glaciers began to flow north into the North Sea, depriving the Black Sea of its main source of replenishment. The level of the Black Sea began to drop, and most of the area around its northern boundary — the area adjacent to present-day Crimea and the Sea of Azov — became dry land. At this point, the level of the Black Sea was several hundred feet below that of the Mediterranean, and the two were separated by the barrier of the Bosporus, then dry land. This situation, with the world ocean rising while the Black Sea was falling, could not last forever. Eventually, like a bathtub overflowing, the Mediterranean had to pour through into the Black Sea basin.
It was this event that Pitman and Ryan believe could be the flood recorded in the Book of Genesis. The salt water poured through the deepening channel, creating a waterfall 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls (anyone who has ever traveled to the base of the falls on the Maid of the Mist will have a sense of the power involved). In a single day enough water came through the channel to cover Manhattan to a depth at least two times the height of the World Trade Center, and the roar of the cascading water would have been audible at least 100 miles away. Anyone living in the fertile farmlands on the northern rim of the sea would have had the harrowing experience of seeing the boundary of the ocean move inland at the rate of a mile a day.
The ark would have worked
According to Genesis 6:13-22, God's instructions to Noah were as follows: "The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high."
It turns out, the math is correct. According to calculations made by physics students at the University of Leicester in 2014, the ark would have actually floated and safely carried pairs of each animal species through the flood!
There are countless stars in the sky
Sure, we know that the universe has a lot of stars. And by a lot, we're talking about up to a trillion stars per galaxy. And it's estimated that there about 100 billion galaxies in the universe!
The Bible actually mentions this in Jeremiah 33:22: "I will make the descendants of David my servant and the Levites who minister before me as countless as the stars in the sky and as measureless as the sand on the seashore."
The Bible also mentions that stars' brightness or magnitude varies. "The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor." (Corinthians 15:41)
We now know that stars and other astronomical bodies die. Science has confirmed this, but the Bible also mentions it. Matthew 24:35 reads: "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away."
The universe is made of invisible particles
Hebrews 11:3 reads: "By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible."
It sounds like the Bible is talking about atoms. Protons, neutrons, and electrons on their own are invisible to the naked eye. Atoms make up pretty much everything, including us.
David could have actually defeated Goliath
A small boy defeating a giant might sound unlikely, but the story of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17 says otherwise.
A slingshot might not be the most powerful weapon, but the stones from Elah Valley were made of barium sulphate, which is extremely dense and these would have easily hurt Goliath.
But there's more. Being a giant, Goliath likely suffered from acromegaly (overproduction of growth hormone). This can cause problems with vision, and peripheral vision can be limited, which would have been handy for David.
There are mountains underwater
These landforms are actually called seamounts, and are mentioned in the Bible.
Psalm 104:6 reads: "You covered it with the watery depths as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains."
The Sun actually stopped moving
Because an eclipsed occurred. Joshua 10:12 reads: "On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel: 'Sun, stand still over Gibeon, and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.'"
This was most likely an eclipse, which researchers have dated back to October 30, 1207 BCE.
Creatures can't live without blood
Most of us are familiar with the Adam and Eve story of the Bible. Humans have, in fact, a female biological ancestor called Mitochondrial Eve, which precedes our species (Homo sapiens). There is, however, one thing that connects all us living creatures: blood.
"For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life" (Leviticus 17:11).
Off topic – did Jesus Lie Meme