Myths from Hell

Many speak of God’s green earth and rejoice in its beauty, but James Trefil tells us it was born from hell.  In his article in Astronomy (Dec 2007), entitled, “Earth’s Fiery Start” he spoke with eyewitness confidence:

Earth hasn’t always been a green and pleasant place.  In fact, our planet’s infancy was a violent, chaotic time.  When you visualize the hellish conditions back then, it’s hard to reconcile it with the lush planet we see now….
In any case, once all this turmoil ceased, … Earth settled down into a comfortable middle age – an age that allowed intelligence to evolve and ponder our planet’s tumultuous beginnings.

No doubt about it.  But how would he know?  Too bad the next article in the same issue puzzled over the recent discovery of a cosmic alignment of the solar system and cosmic background radiation (see 10/02/2007).  Dragan Huterer considered all the leading theories for this coincidence, only to conclude, “In each case, the explanation either introduces more coincidences than it solves, or else is simply not consistent with our knowledge of the solar system or the universe’s beginnings.”

In his casual causal tale of philosophy from fire and mind from mindlessness, Yoda Trefil mentioned the Bible only to treat it like mythology:

Conditions were so different back then that geologists refer to the first several hundred million years as the “Hadean” period, to conjure up ancient visions of hell.  In the words of University of Maryland geologist Roberta Rudnick, “The name is classical, but the image is biblical.”

Pick your myth: intelligence from a mindless hell, or “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).  If the former, explain how you could know it is intelligence.  Maybe pondering the 10/28/2007 Dilbert cartoon would help.