Paradise: Dead & Buried

I Mean It This Time Folks. My Final Reply to Damien Mackey and the Four Rivers of Eden

Brett Palmer, © 2008


I admit that in my last article on the subject I stated I would not respond to any further submissions on the topic of the rivers of Eden from creationist Damien Mackey unless he was able to unearth a copy of the Scriptures which does not contradict itself in naming and geographically identifying pre-Flood rivers with post-Flood rivers in a world supposedly destroyed by a global catastrophe. As I've noted time and again, the Bible (at least the one available in most fine bookstores and with internet booksellers) clearly describes the rivers of Eden with names and geography identifying them as having flowed through the Near East a few thousand years ago. According to the Bible, however, this geography was utterly destroyed in Noah's global catastrophe. The Bible clearly states (Gen 6:13) that the world was to be annihilated along with every living thing by the breaking up of the waters of the deep and the deluge of water that fell from the "windows of heaven" during Noah's flood described later in the chapter. It is clear from the Scriptures that Yahweh was remaking the planet he originally formed in the first six days of creation. But, like most apologists who have a cherished belief to defend, Damien does not want to admit the obvious if it causes him to admit the source of these beliefs—the Bible—contradicts itself.

If you are like me, a child growing up in the 1970s, perhaps you remember a toy called a Weeble. As a Wikipedia article on the toy notes, "Shaped like eggs with a weight at the fat, or bottom end, they wobble when pushed, but never fall completely over, hence the name and the slogan 'weebles wobble, but they don't fall down'." I understand the toy made a comeback a few years ago, but that isn't the point. I think Damien is a Weeble. He doesn't seem to understand that centuries of research by many, many people into the "real" location for the garden of Eden have been based upon a faulty premise. That premise, of course, is that a real garden of Eden once existed. He's taking this far too seriously. To be sure, the geographical markers in the Genesis text have real-world counterparts, but that doesn't mean the garden itself –complete with trees growing magical fruit (Gen. 2:9b), a talking serpent (Gen. 3:1) and, apparently, home to every animal known to man (Gen. 2:19)—had a real-world counterpart. I know that no matter how many rebuttals I may author to follow every one of Damien's products of defense, he will continue to write his apologetics. That is why I stated my departure from the discussion in my last article. I knew no matter how many answers I had for Damien's defenses, he'd either ignore them or find some sort of single, marginal creationist source to buttress his position. Even Roswellian, or Atlanthian, or 9/11 conspiracists can find a voice or two for their fringe ideas. So, when Damien notified me a few weeks ago that he'd authored yet another reply to my response of a few months back, I sighed deeply and shrugged it off. I didn't even bother to click the link he included with his email which led to his blog. I just didn't have the time to continue to beat a dead horse. But things like this have a tendency to stick in the back of my mind and attack me when I'm weak. I really should leave moldy, rancid apologetics in the forgotten back of the internet refrigerator, but I guess I'm a glutton for things better ignored. Marginal creationists really don't deserve this much attention, but I guess I've got a soft spot for these guys.

So, a few days before Christmas 2008, during a slow time at work, I went to see what Damien had offered. I convinced myself to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he may have really unearthed a copy of Genesis that was not self contradictory. No. Not really. I was just bored and curious. That's what happens when things at work slow down. So, to venture where angels fear to tread, here's my response to Mackey's latest offering [1], and the last in this series. Mackey's work is highlighted in blue with my responses following:

PARADISE MISSED

A Response to Brett Palmer's "Another Reply to Damien Mackey Regarding My Article, 'The Loss of Paradise'."

Brett Palmer [BP] has never explained to me how he, a self-proclaimed skeptic, could be so certain, philosophically speaking, about matters pertaining to God and his work, the Bible – whether or not it is, in BP's words, "the incorruptible Word of God"…

First of all, if I've "never explained" some detail to Mr. Mackey, it's only because he never asked me. In all the articles penned by Damien, he never once brought up the subject of my "philosophical certainty" pertaining to God and his work, the Bible. Although, on my website, I certainly spell out quite plainly the position I take regarding the Bible as "the incorruptible Word of God", based upon the writings of those apologists I often encounter on my travels through libraries, bookstores and cyberspace. I certainly have no personal certainty regarding this claim. In fact, my position is quite the opposite. And, my website is a repository for my adventures (in writing) examining this claim ("the incorruptible Word of God") in light of scientific research, archaeology, and plain common sense.

or even modern science, palaeography,

Modern science is a reliable source of knowledge. That is why I feel more assured by its findings than I do those of a committed creationist.

'Eden is a fable and a fiction', he claims,

Well, I didn't use that exact phrase so I'm not sure why Damien is putting it in quotations as if I did. Here is what I did write in my last response to his on-going articles:

Both Eden and Atlantis, according to their fables, were utterly destroyed in a supernatural disaster. Both vanished without a trace. Both are fictions.

So, while I didn't use the exact phrase, "Eden is a fable and a fiction", I can be said to have implied the same. Nonetheless, what do I mean by the words "fable" and "fiction" as they relate to the story told in Genesis 2 about the Garden of Eden? A fable is a relatively short story used to teach a moral lesson. These stories often incorporate animals (many times empowered with human speech) or inanimate objects as characters. In many instances, a fable is a story about supernatural or extraordinary persons or incidents. They take on the quality of a legend. In my original article, I stated quite plainly,

It is not at all unlikely that folk stories and legends made their way through the centuries of the region's [Mesopotamia] first great empires that flourished in the oasis of the ancient floodplains of southern modern Iraq. It would not be beyond reason that such stories would place not only the birthplace of civilization in the area but the origins of humanity as well.

It is in this way that I mean the story of Eden is a fable. Eden teaches a moral story within the context of ancient Judaism of obeying Yahweh and the punishment that follows if divine instructions (at least those divine instructions as revealed by the religious authorities) are ignored. The story has no real historical foundation other than the naming of some of the major geographical features of the time. The story sets the birthplace of humanity somewhere in Near East. Modern research, by contrast, has evidence that the first modern human population evolved somewhere in eastern Africa. The story incorporates supernatural entities as well as talking animals as major characters. This fits the definition of a fable and so I stand justified in using such a designation (at least, of course, until someone can produce the site garden itself and at least show the stump of the Tree of Knowledge and/or Eternal Life and perhaps the fossilized remnants of the talking serpent complete with impressions of the creature's voicebox).

By "fiction" I mean, simply, that the story of Eden falls within a class of literature comprising works of imaginative narration. Like fables, which are a subset of this literature, fictional stories sometimes include imaginary things, places or events, postulated for the purposes of argument or explanation. Again, one must understand my use of "fiction" in the overall approach of my argument for these labels to be applied in their proper context and not, as Mackey appears to imply, as merely an insult or as the result of an uniformed education in biblical hermeneutics. My position, which I have backed up repeatedly in this series, is that the Eden of the Bible, as it is described in Genesis 2 could not have existed if one takes seriously the flood claim made in Genesis 6:13, in which the destruction of the earth is said to be total. We can know this because the Eden of Genesis 2 is described with geographical markers which only exist "post flood" in our modern world. So, one needn't even take my position, mentioned earlier, of not taking the Bible as the "incorruptible Word of God", to see the disconnect. It's plain because it is written in the text regardless to whom one ascribes authorship (human or divine). Again, my challenge to Damien was to find a manuscript of the Bible, ancient enough to be taken seriously, which does not contain the two contradictory stories of Genesis 2 and 6. I fear that this latest offering from Mr. Mackey fails to fulfil this challenge so my original thesis still stands –dare I say?—uncorrupted!

However, so that I am not accused again of failing to meet some question existing only in Damien's mind and not on the pages of anything he publishes on his blog, let me say plainly that I do not believe the story of the Garden of Eden for other reasons beyond the disconnect between Genesis 2 and 6. I simply cannot, relying upon the same common rationality available to anyone who wishes to exercise it –and not just the skeptic—buy into a story complete with a supernatural male deity who walks and talks in a lush garden (who is the creator of all physical reality but apparently powerless to know when people are hiding from him in the bushes [Gen. 3:8-9]), two people as the founders of the entire human species (Gen. 3:20), a forbidden tree with magical fruit (Gen. 2:16-17) and talking reptile (Gen. 3:1), all taking place a mere few thousand years ago in an oasis somewhere in the Near East. Think of the Verizon television commercials: there's a customer with a cell phone and behind them is a vast sea of support people, helping to maintain the Verizon telecommunications network. Accepting the historical claim of the Eden story doesn't begin and end with accepting a physical location for a garden bisected by an ancient river. It means accepting a whole host of improbabilities standing behind that story, all of which accumulate into something impossible to accept if one's critical faculties are not stunted by the desire for belief. I can hear the apologists screaming already, "Oh! You have an epistemological bias! You approach everything a priori with naturalism!" Well, sure. And so do they when the subject does not trespass upon their cherished beliefs. Surely, even the apologist doesn't entertain the notion that their car starts in the morning because invisible gremlins were employed by the car manufacturer to do so at the turn of a key, were someone to tell them this were true. Nor do they readily accept a claim that Poseidon commands the hurricanes that sweep across the Atlantic every summer should it be offered. Until and unless the apologist can definitively provide evidence that there indeed exists a Verizon-like network of supernatural realities, what other measure of validity do we have? Were such a story as that about Eden found in any other culture or tradition, and absent the book of Genesis, my wager would be that Damien (and other apologists like him) would agree such a tale had little ground in historical truth, outside the geographical markers. It would be a fable, a fiction. And, yet, because the story is foundational for his own cherished beliefs, Damien (and those like him) is forced by his chosen faith to find some way to drag that story –kicking and screaming, if necessary—into the realm of serious discussion. Such is the unenviable job of the religious apologist.

and modern dating methods.

Modern dating methods are a well-evidenced form of acquiring knowledge. As Niles Eldredge noted in his book The Monkey Business,

We now have literally thousands of separate analyses using a wide variety of radiometric techniques. It is an interlocking, complex system of predictions and verified results –not a few crackpot samples with wildly varying results, as creationists would prefer to believe.

Furthermore, Donald Prothero writes in his book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, regarding these "modern dating methods,"

Creationists don't give scientists any credit for being skeptical and self-critical about their own data. But anyone who deals with geochronology knows that the dates are subject to constant scrutiny by multiple labs, and anything that is fishy is quickly challenged and rejected. The result is an extremely robust set of data, where multiple independent radioactive atomic systems (for example, potassium-argon, uranium-lead, and rubidium-strontium) are used on the same samples, so if any one of them is giving problems, it clearly can be thrown out. The creationists point to one or two examples of supposedly unreliable dates, but when three or more independent dating methods are run in different competing labs on the same rock and give the same answer, there is no chance that this is an accident. After nearly a century of analyses, with thousands of dates checked and rechecked like this, geologists are as confident about the reliability of radiometric dating as they are about any other field of science. The earth is about 4.6 billion years old; this is as much a fact as the observation that it is round! (p 77)

I needn't go further into the details here regarding dating methods when easily accessible sites on the internet, and scores of libraries around the world, give evidence to this reliability. Suffice to say, if Damien wishes to call into question the various and corroborating dating methods used by scores of scientists around the world –in many different disciplines and in many different fields—he will find himself a daunting task indeed.

The skeptic is well summed up by G.K. Chesterton as follows:

G.K. Chesterton was, among other things, a Catholic theologian and apologist of the 19th century. Why use another apologist when I'm certain Damien's own conclusions cannot be far different than Chesterton's regarding the skeptic? Or, if Damien must find another voice for his criticisms, why not find someone a bit more contemporary; someone familiar with the skepticism of the 21st century; someone who knows modern skepticism is informed by the advances made in science over the last century? Is there some sort of added validity if we read the opinions of an apologist from 100 years ago? Regardless, however, I fail to see the authority that someone like G.K. Chesterton holds and why I should care what he thinks about skeptics any more so than should care about Damien's own opinions or those of Oral Roberts, Robert Tilton, James Holding or the lunatic with a megaphone on the corner of Market and Montgomery streets in San Francisco.

The Skeptic

And this is a bad thing? When approaching a claim, particularly claims which are quite extraordinary, is it not good to approach the claim with the notion that the claim may be true, but may also be false? And, that such claims need to be investigated and checked out? Is this not the nature of skepticism? Even Christian apologists approach contrary opinions to their own in favor of "Christian skepticism". They read claims through a particular religious filter.

"Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making truth the test. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all." (The Common Man)

"What is truth?" (John 18:38) I'm certain that "truth" is different for skeptics than it is for Christian apologists. If the geological record indicates that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and that all living things on the planet descended from a common ancestor, that is not "truth" to the likes of Damien Mackey, Ken Ham or Kent Hovind.

Name calling. What else can you expect when the data is not on your side?

Indeed, I can see why a Christian apologist would fear someone who upsets their carefully packed applecart. Anyone –like Copernicus, or Galileo, or Darwin—who "unsettle[s] what has already been settled" by religious dogma indeed could be seen as a threat to the religious establishment and their carefully tended fields.

"Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18:3) I have raised my children to cherish one word above all others in the English language; that word is "why." I tell them to never stop using it when someone tells them that something is true until they have sufficiently exhausted the plethora of answers to that question and are satisfied that they have the best possible conclusion to their curiosity. To criticize that way of thinking is to belie one's own fears of finding the right answers.

Apparently not, because here I am still responding to Mackey's latest defense of Scripture!

Sounds like the complaints of a pre-scientific worldview still gasping for life at the end of the 19th century (and still employed today by retrograde creationists trapped in a world long since abandoned). Complaints that were not to see the wildly successful advances in science based wholly on materialism and not on superstition.

And, while Chesterton may be an unknown to me (but, apparently, highly touted by Mackey), I do agree with at least one thing Chesterton wrote: "A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. (Heretics)"

And F. H. Bradley (as quoted by G. Ardley at front of Aquinas and Kant): "The straightening of the crooked rests on the knowledge of the straight, and the exercise of criticism requires a canon".

Yawn.

True to Chesterton's assertion, that: "Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough," BP never seems to come up with any scenario of his own, but expends all his mental energies in 'breaking up', 'in barbarian fashion', the theses of other people.

As much as Mackey would like to believe this, my original article clearly contradicts him. Indeed, before authoring that piece, I had never encountered another skeptic who noticed the disconnect between the geographical markers mentioned in Genesis 2 and the claim that these markers would have been utterly annihilated in Genesis 6. This was –and as far as I know, still is—a fresh approach to the question of identifying the location of the garden of Eden. If anyone is standing on old ground, it is Mackey, who tries to identify Eden with Israel and the garden with Jerusalem as is actually an old assertion. At least Joseph Smith tried to "break up new fields" by asserting Eden was located in western Missouri! How soon before we read Mackey identifying geographical markers for the rivers in Jackson county? Or, will he do nothing more than "expend all his mental energies in 'breaking up', 'in barbarian fashion', the theses of other people" like the Mormons? Is Damien skeptical of the "American Eden"?

However, not only did my article suggest a heretofore overlooked contradiction in the text (overlooked, of course, as far as I am aware), but it also offered a positive reading for the tale. I mentioned that the story could have some historic foundation insofar as it names accurate geographical markers of the lower Mesopotamian delta, but that it served as a legendary tale for the origin of humankind in the very real region of Western civilization's birthplace. Of course, this sort of story may not be of strong historical interest today, to the point that it really does tell us something about humanity's origins, but it does help us a great deal in understanding the culture from which it arose.

Now, one reason I have –and continue to-- "break up" the theses of other people, as Damien so delicately puts it, is because other people –for example, a gentleman named Damien Mackey—brought their theses (or, more accurately, creationist apologetic) to my attention and continue to do so. It seems rather dishonest of Mackey to try and fit me with the black Stetson of the "bad guy" when it is he himself who stepped into the corral and issued the challenge by originally trying to "break up" my own thesis (which, of course, was initially penned with no knowledge of Mackey or his own assertions on the subject). But even in "breaking up..the theses of other people" I make no apology. This isn't about being a nice guy or a barbarian. It's searching for truth. And, in the search for truth, the path is littered with faulty, out-dated, disproved and false theses from other people. Such is the nature of the advancement of knowledge. Conservatives like Mackey often get streamrolled by such advancement and wail while being run over, but their failed theses must make way for newer and better understandings of our world, regardless of the pain it causes them.

BP, however, gives the impression that he firmly believes himself to be certain in regard to the received skeptical opinion concerning God and Creation, the Bible, Paradise, and especially the 'truth' of modern science; despite the fact that one system of dogmatic scientific 'belief' can eventually be replaced by another one, even in the space of a lifetime.

I don't believe myself to be certain that Genesis 2 and 6 contradict one another, I am certain of it! When you have a passage that claims, "The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan had their windows washed the afternoon of July 4th, 2008" followed by another passage claiming, "The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were attacked and utterly destroyed the morning of September 11th, 2001", you cannot but see a contradiction. It's not a matter of belief.

Furthermore, if Mackey believes that "one system of dogmatic scientific 'belief' can eventually be replaced by another one" he not only contradicts himself (for how can something dogmatic be replaced? It is the nature of dogmatism to resist replacement) but he also criticizes the very heart and soul of science which, I am fairly certain, he praises in many silent ways (such as taking medicine when ill or accessing the internet to post his musings). For, it is the nature of science to be self-critical and self-correcting. Unlike religious assertions, scientific theories and hypotheses are open to falsification. Damien, for example, is certain that a misty garden once existed in the Near East, complete with a strolling deity, lions lying with lambs and conversational reptiles. For Damien, such a place is beyond falsification. As evidenced by his alternating and competing sources (Yahuda in one essay, Johnson the Old Age creationist in another) and his initial desire to respond to my original essay with an unsolicited defence of his beliefs and the almost obsessive need to continue to pen replies, no amount of evidence will convince him that the Eden story of Genesis 2 is a fable.

Likewise, as a Young Earth creationist, Damien likely rejects evolution as a legitimate scientific theory and probably believes all creatures were specially created by an omnipotent, supernatural being in the span of a mere 24 hours, just as described in the first chapter of Genesis. Such creation included not only the fish of the sea (Gen. 1:21), the birds of the air (Gen. 1:20) and the cattle in the field (Gen. 1:24) spontaneously bursting into existence at the same time, but that this creation included such creatures as Dickinsonia, Tiktaalik, the ichthyosaurs, Monoclonius, Plateosaur and other dinosaurs as well as early mammals like the Hyaenodonts and Miacids known only to us through the fossil record. And all these animals, following Day Six in creation, would have lived happily side-by-side in the Paradise known as Eden with the first two humans of our species. Of course, the modern scientific theory of evolution has a different idea of what occurred in our earth's past. Via many different lines of evidence, scientific theories demonstrate that the earth is very old and that life gradually evolved over eons. Creatures like Tiktaalik once made a living in shallow coastal waters but did not have to worry about being plucked from the shallows by an ichthyosaur or a hungry Flintstonian fisherman. The fossil record shows these creatures –early "fishapods", tetrapods, dinosaurs and human beings—lived millions of years apart from one another.

Can we falsify Damien's worldview? Not hardly. Damien's worldview contains things like hidden river systems that no one can find but that Damien believes with unshakable surety once flowed beneath the surface of the Near East connecting the rivers mentioned in Genesis so that Eden's garden can be said to have once stood in what today is Jerusalem and where now there is the Jewish Wailing Wall and the Muslim Dome of the Rock. Damien's worldview includes talking serpents and godmen who can raise themselves from the dead and atone for humanity's "sins". Damien's worldview rejects –in the face of overwhelming evidence in their favor—dating methods that give the earth's age as somewhere close to 4.5 billion years.

Can we falsify modern scientific evolution theory? Of course we can. All we need to do is find fossilized remains of a modern human inside the stomach cavity of something like a Tyrannosaurus rex. If we find evidence of Dimetrodons walking the tidal plains of the early Cambrian that would suffice as well. However, to date, no such falsifying evidence has ever been found. To be sure, creationists have claimed that such evidence exists. They've claimed to have found human footprints alongside dinosaur tracks, for example. Such claims, however, have been debunked. [2] Some claim to have found a modern hammer in rock believed to be millions of years old. Again, the claim is a false one. [3] Nonetheless, science is still open to the possibility that something like human remains alongside dinosaur remains, or modern artifacts embedded in ancient strata could one day be found and falsify current theories. This is a potential totally lost on Young Earth creationists like Damien Mackey.

Now, doesn't it strike one curious that a man whose worldview is impervious to falsification has the temerity to accuse the skeptic of being unjustifiably "certain" of his position, driven by bias and pride, of being like a tired child and unmotivated by a search for truth, regardless of whether or not the answers uncovered affirm or deny cherished beliefs?

Thus it is assuredly not something to which one ought to give anything like one's complete trust. One supposedly unassailable scientific model gets thrown out, only to be replaced by another more pragmatically advantageous one.

Evidence exists above that Damien Mackey has a motivation beyond the quest for unbiased truth when he criticizes scientific methods. Science isn't interested in pragmatism. Scientific theories rise and fall upon the merits of their explanatory power, and upon nothing else. If a scientific theory has explanatory power one day, but subsequent research exposes weaknesses in that theory (science is nothing if not self-correcting), it is the mark of a robust and tireless science for that theory to either be altered in the light of this new research or for that theory to be abandoned altogether. Why, for example, continue to believe that the earth's continents have remained fixed from the formation of the planet when updated evidence shows that the landmasses have made slow, creeping progress around the globe as parts of tectonic plates riding atop a molten sea of rock underneath simply because at one time such an idea was "settled"? Is that how Damien wants humanity to progress in its knowledge? What Damien seems to be arguing is that it is better to cling to unalterable, ancient superstitious beliefs –regardless of their explanatory power—simply because they are not falsifiable and have a deep history. This is conservatism run amok.

Or, as Gavin Ardley would have it (in his Aquinas and Kant), one 'Procrustean bed' is replaced by another 'Procrustean bed'.

Again, Mackey's complete lack of understanding of how science works is laid bare. He'd rather us cling to Bronze Age ideas than expand our knowledge. For the likes of Damien Mackey, change is the currency of the Devil and advancements in knowledge an insult to the Lord (unless, of course, such advancements affirm certain "settled" Bronze Age ideas).

BP seems to accept with complete faith scientific dating methods,

"BP" accepts modern scientific dating methods not based upon faith, but because such methods have been evidenced as reliable many times over by many independent sources. But, recall, if Mr. Mackie has a problem with these "scientific dating methods," then he has a problem with his latest source: Gaines R. Johnson. It will be remembered that Johnson is an "Old Earth creationist", one who believes the biblical tale of creation can fit into the accepted dating of the earth as 4.5 billion years old. It is to this same Johnson's placing of the rivers of Eden that Mr. Mackie has retied his wagon on the subject. So, as noted in my previous discussion, Mr. Mackey is a cafeteria apologist, picking and choosing which arguments suit him, regardless of who offers them and their position on other matters, so long as he can utilize what's being argued for his own apologetic. Indeed, if I were to have agreed that "Eden" was a mythical land but was moulded over a geographical template which placed it in Israel, with the Garden squarely in Jerusalem, I have little doubt that Mr. Mackey would be singing my praises where we have agreement while ignoring the foundation of my position that the tale is mythical at its core.

and the conclusions reached by the employment of these; even though these conclusions can fluctuate in time by tens or hundreds of thousands, millions, or even billions, of years.

"Billions of years"? That's an odd statement seeing as how the earth has only four of those billions if years in its history. I've never run across a study of the geologic column where one date given for a particular layer is dated "billions" of years differently than another. Notice that Damien offers no evidence of these accusations. He merely tells his audience that the dating methods are flawed and expects his readers simply to take his word for it. After all, the dating methods contradict his religious views so they must be false. Remember, nothing can falsify Damien's cherished beliefs.

A true science must be able to account for all of the major data.

Now Mackey is accusing science of being dishonestly biased. How does he know science does not account for all the data, major or otherwise? You see, this is a favorite tactic among creationists. If modern science does not line up with their preconceived notions of biblical inerrancy, they'll accuse it of being biased and of ignoring contradictory evidence. It's probably one of the most blatant examples of projection [4] ever so boldly displayed.

Thus one cannot honestly hold to the truth of the received geological succession,

"Received"? Geology is not a science built upon revelation.

for instance, when there are examples of one rock formation layer situated above another that has been a priori estimated as being several million years younger than the former.

Rock formations are dated by a number of methods. Not every successive rock layer is estimated as being several million years younger than the one underneath. In fact, rock layers can vary in age by years, decades, centuries, millennia, etc., all depending on the type of rock layering being studied. Indeed in the past it was assumed –for good reason—that rock layers situated above lower rock layers were likely to be younger in age, but no one knew how old the layers were. It's rather common sense. As one layer of earth gets deposited over an existing layer of earth, the layer that was there first must be older than the new layer being formed on top if it. But that "a priori" assumption has been proven true time and again by modern dating methods and not just on assumptions. Ignoring this embarrassingly rich wealth of evidence only belies the creationist's true motive: to protect cherished beliefs even to the point of dishonesty and self-delusion.

Or when a tree is found growing through as many as three sedimentary layers (hence 'polystrate'), each layer dated a million or more years differently from the other.

This assertion is so packed with nonsense that I'm not really sure what Damien is trying to say. Is he suggesting he knows of a tree that has been found actively growing through sedimentary layers, each layer measured to be a million or more years different than its neighbor? I'm just not certain what he's trying to argue. Usually, the subject of "polystrate" fossils is brought up by creationists as "evidence" for Noah's global flood; but, as will be discussed shortly, Damien doesn't buy into a worldwide flood for Noah, but a much more isolated catastrophe. The "polystrate" trees [5] in Nova Scotia then, for example, would be of little interest to Damien unless he's trying to use these features to argue some other point. I think that point may be that these so-called "polystrate" fossils are an example that the mainstream scientific methods for dating the sedimentary layers are flawed. If that is the case, he's going to need to present some sort of evidence of his claim as I am not aware of any such tree "growing through" sedimentary layers where each layer is dated to millions of years separate from another.

Along similar lines, I have just received an e-mail with this interesting piece from geologist, Guy Berthault:

Never heard of Guy Berthault. Is there a reason I should be impressed by whatever he wrote in this email piece?

A team of Russian sedimentologists directed by Alexander Lalomov (Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Ore Deposits) applied paleohydraulic analyses to geological formations in Russia (examples are the Crimean Peninsular and the North-West Russian Platform). In the case of the Platform it is shown that the time taken for the sediments to deposit would have been no more that 0.01% of that ascribed to them by the geological time-scale. This demonstrated the lesson taught by geology historian Gabriel Gohau that "time is measured by the time taken for sediments to deposit, a fact upon which everybody is more or less agreed, and not by orogenesis of biological revolutions." Evolution cannot, therefore, occur in such a short time.

I find it astonishing that Mackey would claim to find some sort of support in this snippet. Wasn't it Mackey who just wrote that modern dating methods are unreliable and that modern scientific theories are merely one procrustean bed substituted for another? What methods, does Mackey suppose, were utilized by this "team of Russian sedimentologists" to date their geological formations from which their conclusions were drawn? Did they use the same "flawed" methods that Mackey just got finished suggesting to us were nothing more than smoke and mirrors? If so, why, then, should he have any faith in this new procrustean bed? Of course, the answer is rather obvious. The conclusion of this snippet agrees with Damien's worldview so, in this one instance, those dating methods worked true and any hundreds of other test that may eventually reverse this finding will be just other examples of the system fails so miserably most of the time.

I discovered that this snippet is identical to an abstract published online advertising for a conference to be held in Rome on November 3, 2008 under the title, "A Scientific Critique of Evolution" [6]. I am yet to find the assertion represented in any peer-reviewed journal or read any responses to these claims by other mainstream geologists. Until I do, this merely stands as one creationist's assertion passed along by another without the critical faculties to even evaluate the scientific validity of the conclusion. When the larger community chimes in on this research –when "true science…account[s] for all of the major data"—then this can be re-examined.

BP's vast 'Eocene' and 'Pliocene' estimates may perhaps need to be seriously reconsidered.

May perhaps? Well, if "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas, now wouldn't we? The Eocene and Pliocene (notice how Mackey puts these within quotation marks as if they are not real epochs but instead fables like "Eden" and "Noah's Flood"?) do not belong to me so I'm not sure why he's calling them "BP's". If they belong to anyone, they belong to Sir Charles Lyell who coined the terms around 1829. As one of the few scientists of the time to support On the Origin of the Species, and a close personal friend of Darwin, I wonder if someone like Chesterton would have had a few choice words to describe him? Words that 21st century creationists would cherry pick with great delight?

Regardless, the Eocene and Pliocene are well-established epochs in earth's history, spanning from 5.5 million years ago (the beginning of the Eocene) to 1.8 million years ago (the end of the Pliocene). These dates have been tested and re-tested multiple times over the decades and remain accurate. As Eldridge noted, dating these epochs was not done with only "a few crackpot samples" but upon a foundation of "interlocking, complex systems of predictions and verified results" employing "literally thousands of separate analyses using a wide variety of radiometric techniques." But, when Lyell first coined these terms, he had no idea how old these layers were. It was not until 1895 with the discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel that the first reliable numerical ages were able to be assigned to the various rock layers. From that day to this, innumerable tests have been conducted on these rocks, arriving repeatedly at the same numerical ages. As Prothero noted, these ages are as "much a fact as the observation that [the earth] is round!"

It seems that most commentators today (e.g. Rohl, Kitchen, Zarins, Sauer, Johnson, Hamblin) accept that the rivers 'Hiddekel' and 'Perath' of the Eden geography (Genesis 2:10-14) are, respectively, the Mesopotamian rivers, Tigris and Euphrates. As do I.

The question is, therefore, did these two rivers enframe an Eden to the east of them, or to the west?

Whereas most, I think, would opt for the east, I myself would go the other way: west. I have taken as my basic template – though it may be in need of some re-designing – Professor A. Yahuda's view that the other two rivers, 'Pishon' and 'Gihon', lay to the west.

Of course it may be in need of some redesigning. It needs redesigned every time a "better" argument is found among the marginal creationists with whom Damien can find friendly shelter. Such is the nature of trying to force a scientific examination onto a fable never meant to be read as dry history.

This is a point at which Mackey's article begins to go into the identification of the rivers, naming of the regions they watered, Damien's location of "Paradise" in Isarel, etc. As much as I would like to hold hands with Damien down this garden path again, the majority of his article simply rehashes material already discussed in my earlier entries on the subject. He offers little in new argumentation. Consequently, I will not be replying to the entirety of his latest effort going forward, but will only concentrate on any new ideas he may present.

My only divergence from Yahuda as to the identification of the four rivers, now, is that I would probably take the recently-discovered 'fossil river' in Saudi Arabia (to which BP refers) as originally the Pishon of the gold-bearing region

Jesus ben Sirach (C2nd BC) wrote, in the Book of Ecclesiasticus (or Sirach), of the Pishon and Gihon as rivers still flowing abundantly and being seasonal in his own day, along with the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Nile and Jordan (the latter two probably being Flood-and-earthquake, or catastrophe-effect additions to the original rivers of the region).

Sirach 24:25-27: "This is what makes wisdom brim like the Pishon, like the Tigris in the season of fruit, what makes understanding brim over like the Euphrates, like the Jordan at harvest time; and makes discipline flow like the Nile, like the Gihon at the time of vintage".

Now, if the Pishon were indeed that 'fossil river' of Saudi Arabia, which BP – a follower of Kenneth Kitchen, who does accept this – seems to be suggesting, then, since this original river is thought to have dried up between 3500-2000 BC, Kitchen's "in very far antiquity", this would starkly show up again the inaccuracy of fossil dating methods. For we have evidence from Sirach's ancient text (dated to the c. C2nd BC) that the Pishon was a flowing river at least at that late BC date - roughly 200 BC as opposed to 2000 BC (and that's taking only the younger age estimate). Nor do we know how long it was after Sirach's day that the river actually dried up.

It would hardly be the case that "fossil dating methods" would show up to be "starkly" inaccurate if the river, now being identified as the biblical Pishon, could be known to have continued to flow beyond 2000 BCE. If such a discovery were made, what methods do you suppose would be used to determine that fact? Certainly a marginal mention of this river in some Jewish apocalyptic literature is not sufficient. The methods used to determine the last date water flowed down this river course would be the same methods that Damien currently pooh-poohs. Indeed, if a research paper were published by a geologist that placed the final flow of the "fossil river" at c. 200 BCE, I am confident that Damien would quote from it and link to it as evidence that Kitchen's acceptance of the c. 2000 BCE date was misplaced (and, subsequently, so was mine).

But it's unclear to me why it is important to note when the river stopped flowing. Were it still to carry water today, what difference does it make to the Genesis story other than to further underscore my original point? Rivers that can be identified today as having been named in the biblical tale of Eden are evidence that Genesis 6:13's claim of a catastrophe that utterly destroyed the landscape as it was in the days of Adam are false. The identification of these Edenic rivers as courses that still flowed in the Near East up to –let's give Damien the benefit of the doubt—c. 200 BCE and beyond is incorrect for they would have been destroyed in Noah's deluge. Or the tale of the utter destruction of "the earth" by Noah's flood was either false or a gross exaggeration because the identification of the rivers is accurate but, they are still there! It simply cannot be that the same rivers identified by "Rohl, Kitchen, Zarins, Sauer, Johnson, Hamblin", Yahuda and Mackey are the same rivers of Eden if the deluge of Noah destroyed them as part of the earth along with "all flesh" (Gen 6:13) save Noah and those with him on ark. How many times must this be driven home? It is the same dilemma recognized by creationist Mark Looy as discussed in my original article. Looy recognized that the great flood of Genesis 6:5-8:22 would have utterly wiped out any trace of the Edenic rivers had they been the same ones flowing through the Near East today. Looy's solution was then to claim, quite without any supporting evidence, that the rivers named in today's Near East are merely namesakes for the original Tigris and Euphrates that ran through Eden in the pre-flood world! Of course, I deal with this assertion in my original essay and there's no need to cover old ground here. Besides, Damien does not agree with Looy's conclusion. Instead of letting the rivers get wiped out in Noah's deluge, Damien ignores the text of Genesis 6:13 and makes another unsupported assertion.

BP, who has accused me of hitching my wagon, now to Yahuda, now to Gaines Johnson, might do well for his own part not to follow Kenneth Kitchen in complete blind faith.

Seeing as Damien has marshalled no evidence to support his claim that the "fossil river", now identified as the Pishon of the Eden tale, other than to refer to a single passage in a Jewish apocryphal work, I see no reason to abandon my reliance on Dr. Kitchen for these sorts of data. Besides, as I mentioned above, it hardly matters whether or not the "fossil river" stopped flowing in 2000 BCE or 200 BCE. If Noah's flood was as devastating as Genesis 6:13 says it was, we wouldn't be identifying a "fossil river" in the modern Near East as the Pishon of the Genesis 2 story. Any remains of the river simply would not exist for us to locate.

Dr. Kitchen has managed to make a total mess of the later Egyptian chronology.

This is because Dr. Kitchen is at odds with the marginal, rejected views of David Rohl, in whose assertions Damien has found shelter. What Damien is suggesting is that we need to make sure we only follow the marginal members of the community when –although their views have been rejected by their peers—their arguments help sustain cherished religious beliefs. Any port in the storm is better than the ones with peer-accepted, well-evidenced and tested views that are nonetheless at odds with Damien's religious faith.

BP has logically argued that one cannot accept a global, all-effacing Flood, but still purport to search for the location of the Garden of Eden, as some 'Creationists' are currently doing. In fact it was the Genesis account of the geography of Eden and its rivers that served (along with other factors, such as Mesopotamian archaeology) to convince me that the Noachic Flood could not have been global in our terms.

So, here we are once again, at the bedrock of the disagreement between us. Damien recognizes my original argument that the story of Eden in Genesis 2 cannot possibly be reconciled with the all-catastrophic, worldwide deluge described in Genesis 6-8. Recognizing this contradiction, but not willing to throw out the garden with the flood waters, Damien decides he's going to have to reject the literal reading of one of the stories and find a way to minimize the impact of the other. He does so by diminishing the global flood of Genesis 6-8 by making it a localized event. Clearly, Genesis 6:13 does not describe the flood as merely affecting a narrow region of the Near East, but it's necessary for Damien to have it do so for his beliefs. He must maintain the historical accuracy of the text, even if it means ignoring what is actually written there.

BP though wrongly states that the Flood is supposed to have covered the entire world as we know it.

I didn't say that. I merely reported on what the Bible clearly states. Genesis 6:13 plainly says, "And God said to Noah, 'I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth.'" The world that was destroyed was not the "world as we know it." The world as we know it has a Tigris and a Euphrates flowing through its Near East. The world as we know it has a Jerusalem, and a Paris, and a London and a New York. The world that was covered and destroyed in Noah's deluge was the world upon which Adam and Eve, their sons and daughters, and their descendents to the family of Noah trod. It was the world that contained the garden of Eden. It was the world Genesis 6:13 describes as being utterly destroyed in favor of a new world. It was a world wholly unknown to us post-flood survivors.

St. Peter, on the other hand, specifically tells us that "the world that then was" was destroyed by the Flood (2 Peter 3:6).

Which is exactly what I have said.

Now, what was the only world that scripturally preceded the Flood? It was the world of the four rivers of Genesis 2.

Which, according to Scripture, was utterly destroyed in the Flood. Damien may want to read Genesis 6:13 and 2 Peter 3:6 again. And again. And again. And, maybe, even one more time for this to sink in.

Basically, the "Fertile Crescent".

That is not right if Genesis 6:13 is correct. If "the world that then was" was destroyed in Noah's flood, then it was not the "Fertile Crescent" of today's geography. If it was, why can we still find the "four rivers of Eden" in today's world (or, at least identify what is believed to be the four rivers as I do in my original essay and Mackey does with his own study)? It seems Mackey agrees that this world was utterly destroyed, as do Genesis 6:13 and 2 Peter 3:6. Where is he going with this?

Even as late as the New Testament the 'world', 'earth' 'ends of the earth', 'all under heaven', were still being conceived in these limited terms.

But I thought the Bible was inspired by an omniscient God. I figured an omniscient God was not hamstrung by the conventions and limitations of mere mortals. What Mackey is saying here is that when the Bible says "all the earth" it really doesn't mean "all the earth" when such a phrase causes difficulties with the text. Remember what I said about falsification earlier? Damien cannot have his worldview falsified so he is forced to construct apologetics to rescue his cherished beliefs from the trashbin of history, keeping them from molding along with the likes of Zeus, Odin and Ahura Mazda. It's a tactic used by many apologists. The Bible is to be read literally up to, and until, it can't be because a literal reading creates a contradiction or a discrepancy. Needing to construct ways to avoid the Bible from contradicting itself is what gave birth to apologetics..

Damien wants readers to believe that when God inspired the text of Genesis 6:13 to be written –in his estimation by the venerable Moses himself—instead of choosing words and phrases which would have indicated a narrower strip of land, he inspired merely the word "earth" with no limiting parameters. It is not as though constructing phrases to indicate limited geographic locations is unknown in the Hebrew texts. See, for example, Genesis 47:21 where Egypt is given boundaries: As for the people, he made slaves of them from one end of Egypt to the other. Or consider a passage from Joshua 15:5 in which another limited landscape is described: And the east boundary is the Dead Sea, to the mouth of the Jordan. And the boundary on the north side runs from the bay of the sea at the mouth of the Jordan.

To be sure, I am not arguing that the Hebrew word for "earth" ('erets) which is used in Genesis 6:13 can only mean the entire global planet. But, when it is employed by the biblical authors to refer to a narrower strip of land instead of the entire world, the context of the passage in which it is found provides which definition is most appropriate. So, for example, 'erets is used in Genesis 6:13 when God tells Noah that he will destroy "all flesh" and "the earth" ('erets) along with it and we understand from the context of the story that "the earth" here means the entire globe (or, at least the entirety of the world as it was known to the ancients who wrote the text, encompassing not only their inhabited strip of soil, but other bordering nations and whatever mysteries laid beyond. However, when 'erets turns up in passages like Genesis 13:7 (and there was strife between the herders of Abram's livestock and the herders of Lot's livestock. At that time the Canaanites and the Perizzites lived in the land. ['erets]), we understand from the passage's context that something smaller than the known world (and those regions beyond) was intended. More forcefully, passages like 1 Samuel 29:11 (So David set out with his men early in the morning, to return to the land ['erets] of the Philistines. But the Philistines went up to Jezreel) let us know when "the earth" meant everything known to the authors (the entirety of the earth) or only specific portions of it.

Damien's is a clever tactic to try and get around the plain reading of the Genesis text, but upon further examination it does him no good. The authors of the text, had they wanted to refer to something smaller than "the earth" in its known entirety, had words at their disposal to leave that impression with their readers. And, if God was truly the author of the text, his omnipotence surely was not diminished by humankind's own geographic ignorance of the world. Indeed, I would have little doubt that Damien would argue that the biblical text does not describe a flat earth, pointing to passages like Job 26:10, and insisting (in spite of the fact that people of the time had no way to know the earth was a sphere) that the "inspired" text of the Bible nonetheless got the science right. And how did they get it right? Because God inspired them so from his wisdom. So, when it suits their needs, the Bible is the product of people with a limited scope of the natural world around them, and when it doesn't suit their needs, these same people of ignorance were guided by the divine intelligence to write about things beyond their understanding. Again, such is the unenviable job of the religious apologist.

There are many examples of this, two classic cases being Acts 2 in which "every nation under heaven" (v. 5) is soon geographically specified (vv. 7-11) as from Persia to Rome (EW), Phrygia to Egypt (NS);

I included this example from Damien because it spits in the face of what he's been arguing and agrees wholly with what I just wrote above. Damien claimed in this latest rebuttal that "even as late as the New Testament" the textual references to "the world," and "the earth" were meant in the "limited terms" of their culture's own worldview. We know that the average person of 1st century Jerusalem and Rome was unaware of the civilizations in the Americas, for example. But we're not talking about the average person jotting something down on a discarded piece of pottery in a Roman alley. We're talking about the inspired Word of God. Surely, when God inspires such phrases as, "every nation under heaven" and "every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God" (Romans 14:11), he intended the reference to include the people and places like China, northern Europe and the Americas. After all, God surely was aware of these other nations "under heaven" and these others knees and tongues. And yet, when not the literal "every nation under heaven" is meant, the text defines what it intends. As Damien notes, following the phrase "every nation under heaven," those nations intended are listed. Were this to be an example of his current argument, the phrase in Genesis 6:13 would be followed by a defining verse limiting "the earth" to just that region known to Noah stretching, perhaps, merely from Egypt, up through the Levant, turning in modern Turkey and down to the Persian Gulf. But, of course, no such limiting definition is given in the text.

All life in that relatively small Noachic world, what North calls "the whole universe" of the time, was extinguished by the catastrophic Flood, except for those on board the Ark

And, as I've stated repeatedly in this series, when Damien can find a text which defines "'the whole universe' of the time" as merely the "relatively small Noachic world" –as does the text of Acts 2 when it wants to define "every nation under heaven" as merely those nations "from Persia to Rome, Phrygia to Egypt"—then he'll have a leg to stand on. As it is, he's merely trying to compress the damage of the global catastrophe described in Genesis 6-8 so that the Bible does not wind up contradicting itself from claims made in Genesis 2 as I have so plainly shown.

But, let's take Damien's argument for a moment and apply it to what I've been arguing since 2005 in my original article. The text of Genesis 2 describes the region of Eden by identifying four major river courses. Those courses have been identified in this series of articles as existing landmarks. The text of Genesis 6, however, claims that the world through which these rivers ran was utterly destroyed. My reading of the text has the flood as global on scale. So, not only were the rivers of Eden obliterated in the catastrophe, but so was every other river course running through every other region of the world at the time. But, if we want to limit the flood so that it only affected that "relatively small Noachic world", encompassing merely the ancient Fertile Crescent as Damien apparently wants to argue, aren't we still going to lose every identifiable geographical marker from the "small Noachic world," (i.e. the Fertile Crescent) including the four rivers of Eden in Noah's deluge? So, while the course of the Amazon or the Mississippi may have been unaffected by this localized catastrophe in Damien's scenario, the rives of Eden would not have been spared. So, the question remains, why do we still find them running (at least two of them) today? Were they not, as described in Genesis 6, utterly destroyed? No matter the scope of the flood, Damien is still faced with the inescapable conclusion as presented by the stories given in Genesis 2 and 6. It baffles me why he thinks he has solved the discrepancy merely by shrinking Noah's catastrophe to include only a fraction of the earth's surface. That surface still includes the rivers of Eden that he so desperately wants to rescue from the deluge. The only remaining argument to him now (to which, no doubt, he will turn next) is that Noah's catastrophe wasn't so destructive that it would have destroyed the rivers along with "all flesh." Remember, one cannot falsify Damien's belief system. He will be forced to concoct another way for the rivers to have survived Noah's flood.

What I did gain from BP's first critique – reiterated again in his second effort – was that I really needed to show how the un-named river that flowed through Eden could have been the source of these other four (named) rivers. It is for this reason that I appreciated Johnson's article, which showed, using satellite technology, how these rivers could all possibly connect up (after due allowance for land cataclysmic upheaval) in either Lebanon or Israel.

We still do not have this so-called "source river" nor an ancient text which can reconcile the description of Eden giving modern watercourses as geographical markers and the description of the flood (be it global or localized) which is said to have utterly destroyed them. As noted in my last installment, while Johnson supposes a river ran through the Red Sea basin (Damien's so-called "un-named river") the question is begged for such a course: when could such a river have existed at a time which would have been retained in human memory? Obviously, the river could not have been there while the Sea occupied the basin. Through my analysis of the region (which Damien objects to because he does not trust "modern dating methods"; at least not the ones that disagree with his worldview. The ones that do are just fine) in my previous article we learned that if such a proposed river ever existed, it had to have flowed sometime between the end of the lower Eocene and sometime in the Pliocene (5.3 million to 1.8 million years before present) prior to the opening of the Bab el Mandab and the inundation of sea water into the basin (which would have destroyed any river running through it). Apart from some minor hand waving from Damien's latest article, we still do not have any firm evidence that such a river ever existed or, if it did, an explanation for how Adam and Eve could be found among the various troops of Australopithecus boisei, A. robustus, Homo rudolfensis, H. habilis, H. ergaster or H. erectus which may have drunk from this river's waters.

The tapestry may not yet be complete, but a basic pattern has now begun to emerge upon it.

Tapestry? Seems to me that Damien has constructed something more akin to a garish quilt. What he has is one ad hoc piece of jerry-rigged apologetic duct taped to another ad hoc piece of apologetic without regard for the plausibility of the base argument. His "quilt" is sewn from many different, unrelated parts until they begin to form a "whole" that is appreciated only by the apologist who doesn't mind swatches of red and purple polka-dots next to swatches of green and silver stripes and orange paisley prints. So long as the finished product does a good job of insulating the creator from the harsh coldness of brute reality—that the story of Eden and the Flood are both fables and fictions-- then the quilt has done its job.

Well, it is now the eve of 2009 and I've spent more time than I intended on Damien's latest article. But, seeing as this is the last entry in this saga [7], I hope my readers will forgive its length as a final nail in this coffin. I hope everyone had a happy holiday and will enjoy a prosperous New Year. Back to work now. I guess I should say, "Thanks, Damien, for the distraction. But I have more pressing matters which need attending."

--December 31, 2008



NOTES

1. Mackey's article can be accessed here.   Return to text

2. See "The Paluxy Dinosaur/'Man Track' Controversy."   Return to text

3. See "The London Hammer: An Alleged Out-of-Place Artifact"   Return to text

4. See Psychological Projection   Return to text

5. See Polystrate Fossils   Return to text

6. See "A Scientific Critique of Evoltuion"   Return to text

7. For me to respond to Damien in the future, here are the points he'll need to answer:

1.) How a flood, global or localized, which Genesis 6:13 states destroyed the earth along with all flesh nonetheless left the rivers of Eden intact (at least up until 200 BCE for "Pishon").

2.) Find, don't just speculate about, the actual "un-named source-river" that is claimed to have fed the four named rivers of Eden.

3.) Give overwhelming evidence, complete with peer-reviewed journal entries, that mainstream geochronology and dating methods are incorrect.

4.) Give overwhelming evidence (include fossil remains as well as DNA evidence), complete with peer-reviewed journal entries, that the human species is only c. 6,000 years old and had its origin in the Near East.

5.) Give overwhelming evidence, complete with peer-reviewed journal entries, that mainstream archaeology is wrong about Egyptian chronology.

Answering these five points (and all five points) would be sufficient enough for me to take another look at Damien's musings. I think, however, you see why I'm confident to call this "my last entry in this saga."   Return to text

SOURCES

Prothero, Donald R. (2007) Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters Columbia University Press



                          

Site Contents © Brett Palmer